Jenny Fletcher’s Placenta

My velvet sheets ripple around me 

with muffled cries of anguish.

An animal groan that liquidates cities into swamp

shakes the globe of her belly. 

The mother rakes her cheeks raw at my failure,

picks crescent moons into the skin under her rib cage, 

paints raspberry lip tint across the open wound of her mouth each morning. 

I tell her, Oxygen is the currency of wombs, 

of women afraid to be mothers,

made to order organs shuffled

around your changing body.

I am destitute, a dormouse in a wire snap trap,

strangled by the pink pup I had no crumbs to feed.

A flea-kissed bitch kicked on the street

with a bag of bones in my mouth.

But I will not fail you again.

Eat the world for me, 

Swallow those cities, swallow swamp, swallow shit,

scrape the blood under your nails with your teeth

and feed it to me.   

I hold our dead thing in one hand

and keep his brother on my thighs,

closer: in my breasts. 

See how his hands and feet dance for you, 

beat handprints across your burnished stretch marks. 

Screw shea butter solutions, motherhood is a battlefield, 

it’s beauty is the blood I clean with my hair,

feather tip, flush out the god who hangs his sons on trees.

I’ll bring yours into the light,

kiss their ugly parts until I’m spent. 

Eddie Culmer ‘24

For this piece, we were tasked with writing from the perspective of one aspect from this real life story about a mother having to carry seven-month-old twins in her womb: one dead and one alive. Instead of opting to choose the obvious (the baby's POV or writing from the POV of the mother herself), I decided to focus on the mother's womb/placenta. I removed the thoughts of "failure" or "inadequacy" from the mother and assigned it to this part of her body that was supposed to nurture two children, but now has to carry on providing for one while the other rots. What does it feel like to hold death in your belly? To pivot so hard after the death of this creature you were supposed to love and care for so that you can provide for what has been left in the rubble? These are the questions the woman in the article must have been asking herself. But she must have been too afraid to address aloud for fear of falling apart. Instead, I make it a conversation, an apology, to soften the edge, even if just a tiny, little bit.