Hannah Marshall

BIRTH STORY IV

In the dim apartment, I hand-expressed breast milk into a bottle
and looked into each corner for the key, the clue, the way
to an open door: inside the plastic pail of soiled cloth diapers, 
under onesies in graduated sizes, between the new jagged stripes
on my breasts and belly, the aching smile of my c-section scar. 
All evening, I carried the baby in a sling,
knitting together the broken thinness of her voice, the rattle
of the under-formed tissues in her larynx. But I found no mystery,
no fortune-cookie clue, and there was no timer to buzz my failure
and set me free from the witching hours, from the wingback chair
and the baby. 

The world outside the apartment was awash in millennial-pink inspo,
the latest hot takes on Instagram fame and viral videos, 
each day more radioactive, more kawaii, the limestone hills nearby
turning the electric yellow of Norway maples in the fall. 
I was a body, I was shame, I was beyond shame. I went bare-breasted
between three small rooms. Daylight was a dagger.

Years later, at book club in my backyard, 
a young woman tells how her childbirth went great, I was lucky,
and everything was perfect. I am silent 
inside my ripped-open body, inside the months after the hours 
that changed me from wind to root. I have not said trauma.
I choose easier words: white walls. Apartment.
Tiny red fingers. Swollen ankles. Car carrier. The most beautiful fall day
a postcard can fathom. So many ibuprofen I can’t keep food down.
I am a blind forager. I am an earless vessel. Birth story is the room,
the trapdoor, the place I never enter, the floor I keep falling through.

__________

HANNAH MARSHALL LIVES IN GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN, WHERE SHE WORKS AT THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. MARSHALL’S POEM "THIS IS A LOVE POEM TO TREES" APPEARS IN THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2021. HER POEMS HAVE ALSO BEEN PUBLISHED IN NEW OHIO REVIEW, THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POETRY, I-70 REVIEW, POETRY DAILY, AND ELSEWHERE. HER MANUSCRIPT THE SHAPE THAT GOOD CAN TAKE WAS A FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ST. LAWRENCE BOOK AWARD. SHE RECEIVED HER MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING FROM CONVERSE UNIVERSITY.