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.