Catherine Belling
Chicago, Illinois, United States

Poet’s statement: This poem suggests, from the point of view of an uncomfortably pregnant near-term woman, a possible origin story for humans’ upright posture with its ironic disadvantages for pregnancy and childbirth.

At 38 weeks, wondering How many legs does God have? Two, you say, of course, like us. Or did we in his image graze once peaceably on four, viscera comfortably slung beneath far stabler spines?But Eve reached up on hind legs for the fruit, enlightening Adam with a first look at her appley breasts. He flipped her on her back and made Cain, whose giant head all stuffed with murderous knowledge from the tree would scrape unhammocked down against her pointed bones, feet tangling with her ribs, her gutted lungs.She’d carry him in front until, grinding brain on bone, she’d scream him out uphill, through stirruped legs, cracked coccyx, forceps, fear, into their new, laborious, human world.

The Virgin Mother Damien Hirst Photography by Suzanne Gerber

 

 

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CATHERINE BELLING is an assistant professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Her training is in English literature and her research is on interpretation and anxiety in healthcare and bioethics. As well as many journal articles, she is author of a monograph, A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria.