The woman taking my baby’s information
over the phone asks if I have postpartum
depression. I have no idea, I just want to know
how my reality has become Tucks pads slapped
down in underwear like slices of bologna
and a bra holding rock-hard porn-star tits.
Everything is breasts. My husband’s eyes, English
muffin halves, Katie Couric’s saucer. The nightly
sputter of the heater, a breast pump. At dawn,
it groans “Screw you. Screw you. Rat poo.” Regret
for not saving stem cells dangles in the Pottery Barn
mobile and every two hours a gurgling stream
of milk from my nipples shoots me awake.
In the nursing chair I recount the ludicrous
contortions between contractions that made
the midwife snort “That eighteen-wheeler plowing
through your uterus, that’s nothing special
happens every day,” while she typed
on her Blackberry. Yet we will do it again.
Forget the moment our vagina, butane-doused
and lit, tore open into the newest scalp on the planet.
Wish to vomit crackers while two hearts
beat inside us.
Marcia LeBeau has been published in Handsome Journal, Poemeleon, Inertia Magazine, and others. She received an honorable mention for the Rattle Poetry Prize. She has attended various workshops with writers such as Sharon Olds, Tony Hoagland, Charles Harper Webb, Molly Peacock, Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, and more. Marcia’s poems have appeared in Oprah’s O Magazine and have been read on the radio. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ creative writing program. Marcia has played the violin/viola since she was four, and now plays in chamber groups. She is slightly addicted to self-help seminars and can be found cooking when she’s in a good mood.
