Photo by Robert Thiemann on Unsplash
About the morning I was born, I know
nothing---about the first, sharp contractions
that tore Mother’s belly, bending her over the back
of a chair. I imagine she had not a clue as to what labor
was like, real pain never crossed her mind. Where my father
might have been, she had no idea; and about the literary novel
she was reading for the hell of it, she never told me the title.
Ten years married and very pregnant, what her true due date
really was I profess ignorance. There might have been
an icy storm blowing through Muncie that morning/noon/night.
There were her screams. Did she have trouble scrounging a ride,
such a last-minute thinker, no plan in place? How did labor progress---
quickly or agonizingly slow? No doubt she was given twilight sleep,
a drug to make women forget childbirth, experience a dreamland
where she swam and swam. All I know is that I arrived. And finally
so did my father---the next day. At the hospital, he said nothing
about visiting my mother. He told me later he held me in his arms.
Was I crying? Eyes sealed shut, cardinals flashing wings outside
the nursery window. He often said, deep in the night, when it was just
the two of us, after he used me in terrible ways, that he fell in love
with me the moment he held me in his arms. Down the hall,
she waited days for heaviness in her perfect breasts. Finally, droplets
of milk shimmered her nipples. How she screamed give me a shot.
I am not an animal. After days and nights, filthy from
hard labor in someone else’s greenhouse, he loaded us into
a borrowed pick-up. I must have slept all the way home,
a barrier between them in my carrier bed, wrapped in a pink blanket.
Did they speak of the ritual of my birth, of becoming a family?
In silence, they must have watched dancing crimson birds as snowflakes
sharpened elegant patterns on windows. I was too young to appreciate.
All their lives they did not tell stories of my birth. Never a word about
agony, never a word about the Christmas beauty of those damn birds.
Virginia Chase Sutton's second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, winner of the Morse Poetry Prize, was recently reissued by Doubleback Books (Sundress). Embellishments is her first book and Of a Transient Nature is her third. Down River is her chapbook. Seven times nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have won a poetry scholarship at Bread Loaf, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, the National Poet Hunt, and many other prizes, awards, and residencies. Sutton's poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Comstock Review, QU, Glass: Poetry Journal, and many other literary publications, journals, and anthologies. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.