Venting

We meet for lunch, 
sound off about our husbands,
government corruption,
our various ailments.
We let loose over our sandwiches, 
open doors crusted with rust, 
wedged with torn and tired rags, 
or newly lubricated with yesterday’s irritations.
We tell ourselves better to vent than to stuff.
 
Midmorning in summer the hen next door
intrudes with her Chinese water-torture call:
bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk, bawk—starts slow,
gets faster, louder—she’s venting too.
Her egg, wrapped in the tissue of her uterus,
moves through her vent, (yes, that’s what it’s called)
until she pushes it out of her body,
a kind of inside-out trick.
 
My egg attached to the wall of my uterus,
clung there for nine months, 
zygote to egg to fetus to child.
I labored fourteen hours to shunt my son 
down the birth canal, ten fingers, ten toes, 
nearly turning myself inside out.
My child was twisted, shoulder first,
jammed against my backbone. 
 
He needed freedom, 
we both wanted release.
This baby—shrouded 
in his torn blue caul
pulled through the cut across my body
mouth open, gulps new air.

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