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.

 

by Marcia LeBeau

 

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.

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