That summer, when pregnant was a club
they kept kicking me out of
I was a gumball machine of bad babies.
Wrong babies, backward babies,
backdoor babies, cranking the dial
in a flurry of silver coins that kept delivering
lasagnas. So many sympathy lasagnas,
we had to start freezing them.
During a miscarriage, what food
most resembles your dead baby?
Could we bring it to you?
Red soups, pastas, dark sinew in a bone-white bowl,
I stomached all of it. Offered another vein.
Threw out every last piece of underwear and
remembered the woman
who performs ultrasounds at the emergency room
is named Katie. And poor sad sack
Horatio Spafford. Oh, God.
Oh, God. It was one summer.
I put in my every last quarter.
Kayla Rutledge Page has an MFA in fiction from NC State University. Her work has been published in the Baltimore Review, Ninth Letter, SmokeLong Quarterly, and more. She lives in North Carolina and is working on a novel about performance artists. This is her first skull. www.kaylarutledgepage.com
After experiencing multiple pregnancy losses, I had a difficult time verbalizing to other people how medically and physically devastating the experience was. I felt the language of trouble in the South, where I live, was strongly resistant to this kind of crass physicality —finding it improper, particularly for women, to express. As I edited this poem for Lexi's call, I set a constraint to push deeper into what I felt pressured to sanitize for others, and in the exercise of following it, left in and expanded upon much of what I would normally edit out for its rawness.
