Providence Lying-In Hospital For Women and Girls, 1970

First published in Lake

Girls, we called them girls,   
and they really were girls,
screaming and writhing. 

Laboring in cage-like cribs,
strapped down by nurses and nuns,
hatted with wimples and caps.
How I remember.

I need to check you right now, dearie!
they’d say. Come on, spread your legs—
You can do it, remember you did it before?
You liked it?

I could barely watch,
a college senior, 
with a med student friend.

1970, winter, so long ago.
The cobbled streets
were slick with dirty snow.

Some girls screamed 
in a twilight of drugs—
Demerol, morphine—
dimming their screams
in the fog of labor.

The girls thrashed and howled,
they suffered the muscle burn 
of wombs pushing 
against the inevitable.

Did the nuns relish suffering?
Was it JUST punishment after all?
Onto Jesus for their sins.

Inside the crates of their own fears,
the girls were whisked 
into the delivery rooms
as their babies crowned.

Once inside, octopus limbs of metal 
waited to embrace pulsing bodies.
Their arms and legs bound and strapped,
birth portal obscured by sterile drape;
the girls pushed if they could,
babies grasped and pulled by forceps-wielding  
med students, barely over the threshold of manhood.

SEE ONE, DO ONE, TEACH ONE was the mantra
one day to be mine.

Upstairs on the dimly lit eighth floor, 
the wards were deathly quiet,
the air sodden with the sulfurous smell 
of rotten eggs 
tinged with the mildew scent of failing viscera 
of comatose girls, bilious and bloated
after metal hangers pierced 
their gravid spaces.

Laura Celise Lippman