Family Planning
Fertility charts. Ovulation testing. Procreative sex. So these are the first rounds of as-God-intended before she tries more serious medical intervention.
The furrowed eyebrows threaten. Her feet cringe in the sterile stirrups. Watching her, my feet are cold. The nurses scurry down the hallway: so many patients to impregnate. What a useless nursing student I’ve turned out to be.
As I tune out the specialist, I ponder our scheduled sex life. We’re trying, we’ve said, the haughty optimism of carefree sex equals instant baby. For now, it’s still you and me in the honeycomb sheets, sweaty in the magic of making new flesh with fluids and faith.
When she cries into the blue paper gown, I see the future for us: the dirty talk that fails, the grudging invitation to the stiff whitecoats, the clinical threesome of let’s get this done. I hand her a tissue. I follow the stethoscope into the robin’s egg hallway. Is this what I want?
Aggregate Data
I have seen a number of strange things in the hospital.
Ex: three years, fourteen stillbirths, fifty-six units of blood.
Sometimes these things are too unusual to count.
I’ve been a marriage counselor for a terrified couple,
a bouncer for an abusive spouse, a rock after an infant removal.
I have been a number of strange things in the hospital.
I have taught a new father how to swaddle a screamer,
a new mother to feed the insatiable, a new grandmother to hold her tongue.
Sometimes these things are too (extra)ordinary to count.
I’ve treated preeclampsia, hemorrhage, joy, sorrow, rage;
wrapped a dying infant, refereed a fight, sung Row Row Row Your Boat.
I have done a number of strange things in the hospital.
He trabajado in español, in Creole, in Arabic, and Somali;
I have learned the common language of blood and childbirth.
Sometimes there is nothing more to say.
Every day, I track the minor details of other people’s lives:
She ate breakfast, she walked slowly, she mourned the adoption.
I’ve seen a number of strange things in the hospital.
Sometimes these things are too innumerable to count.
Conviction
After Dean Young
What can I say?
I’ve seen a protester come over to the clinic
when laws allow.
Have seen a corpse there.
Have held hands with a teenager wearily absorbing the ultrasound.
Was head over heart.
Have seen beyond hard trimesters.
I catalog medications, read badly written scripts.
Every story is shaded with stress.
Have seen that women are ants under glass.
Can’t shield them all from the sun.
I badly want to shout.
Always polite.
I say I live with rebellion.
Can’t reconcile Norma from Jane.
What danger is next, only the fiercest passion pulling me along
dizzyingly.
Nevertheless
we trust women– fighting, angry, flashing.
The Supreme Court flickers on the news.
The mad senators wait with their grubby hands
even as
even as women speak their tired truths.
And the protestors pounce,
often grabbing their children.
Listening less to reason over yelling.
They demand.
After shrill shouting (the woman within cringing) their pious throats
into a cavern –
sad boisterous nothings.
Little vampires in bloody tracksuits.
We know what it feels like to suck
a deep energy from marrow, eagerly even—
crying from losing. He with the scalpel scraping carefully
with his hands and voice, my supporting
is the strength without force, your clenched fist
near the vacuum, greedily sucking like a breast pump.
Mary Jane Philpy-Dollins’ work appears in The Poetry Machine: Volume 2 (2021), The Poetry Machine: Volume 3 (2022), and the Waco WordFest Anthology (2023). She is the 2023 President of the Austin Poetry Society. She is a nurse living in Texas.