Heels in stirrups, knees pitched above my hips, I am blinded by every measured breath required before each push— a cold, unnatural discipline.

I was taught to focus on something in the room, to distract from the hell-rigged pain knifing me from the inside. I study the 9 on the clock, its spine curved inward, quiet as a stillborn, as the doctor waits at the mouth of me.

Womb knuckled by spark & spasm, I hold the nurses’ faces— a gallery of stunned amazement—their wet eyes & ruptured mouths. Then push.

A red howl tongues the air. The doctor grips a handful of black hair.

An inch. An inch. An inch. Three feet.

The nurses tilt their bodies in unison, a chorus of gathered weight. Wrenched fists yanking loose the skull that splits me. I have ridden the Lord into salvation, my mother shrieks, shouldering past my pelvis.

Deliver me O, Lord from the blood of the lamb! she sings as her bad brain enters the room.

The nurses lock hands around her waist & pull. A blackbird on the window’s ledge pecks the flesh of a rotted peach.

Lord, I have siphoned the devil from my children’s mouths, I have throned their unholy bodies in shit! I push again, beyond the thickening fog of voices, delivering my mother into an unrelenting light. The nurses drag her to the cleaning station. Her voice pools at their feet, wavering in lost pitch.

They wipe down her shrinking body, suction pearls of mucous from her nose & throat.

She writhes on the table, cold and un-named. Then lessens. Smaller & smaller still, until her body is swaddled in a washcloth & placed in my hands.

She blinks me into focus & the room is bewitched, a museum of blood & silence.

I rock her in my palm— the last blue pill in the bottle—then shove her into the red nest of my missing tooth.

I sing a song to the emptied room, I rise six feet above my bed.