Foundry
  • Home
  • About
    • Masthead
  • Archive
    • Issue One
    • Issue Two
    • Issue Three
    • Issue Four
    • Issue Five
    • Issue Six
    • Issue Seven
    • Issue Eight
    • Issue Nine
    • Issue Ten
    • Issue Eleven
    • Issue Twelve
    • Issue Thirteen
    • Issue Fourteen
    • Issue Fifteen
  • Guidelines

your best post-baby body

Two days after giving birth, my empty belly flopped so tenderly
              in the bathroom mirror in the recovery suite. I was afraid 
 
to shit or take a shower because I wasn’t sure
                        what had happened to me or if the stitches
would rip. I’d heard women say down there would look like meat
 
so for weeks I didn’t look. When Christ came back

            he got to keep his scars. He flashed his stigmata
at the women at the tomb
                         and they knew him as their risen Lord. Three days
 
inside the earth. Two months after giving birth
Heidi Klum walked a catwalk in angel wings. The tabloids tell you
 
                         how she got her body back:
Tori Spelling joined Jenny Craig and lost the weight. J. Lo did her first triathlon
seven months after giving birth to twins. Gisele says, “some women think
 
they can get pregnant and turn their body
             into a garbage disposal.” Gisele walked the runway
in wings and a g-string six weeks after an ecstatic
 
natural birth. Natural is one way not to say
vagina in mixed company. The girl-saint loved the Lord
 
and then she wouldn’t eat
                        is every story.
Christina loved the Lord
            and turned splinter-thin. She loved him
right up out of her body, her stigmata visible
 
only to herself. And through that long cold-bodied death, Christ never
             learned to listen. “This body is the site of a miracle,”
says Kerry Washington. Kerry Washington does 6 a.m. Pilates
 
while her daughter sleeps. In the recovery room
             I’m a stretched and sagging balloon. When I get my body back
all the parts are rearranged and worn. When I get my
             body back it’s not quite mine again. When I get my body back. 
Picture
Angel, 18th century. Italy. Polychromed terracotta head; wooden limbs and wings; body of wire wrapped in tow; various fabrics. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Nancy Reddy is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University in southern New Jersey.
Back
Next
Issue nine
© COPYRIGHT 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About
    • Masthead
  • Archive
    • Issue One
    • Issue Two
    • Issue Three
    • Issue Four
    • Issue Five
    • Issue Six
    • Issue Seven
    • Issue Eight
    • Issue Nine
    • Issue Ten
    • Issue Eleven
    • Issue Twelve
    • Issue Thirteen
    • Issue Fourteen
    • Issue Fifteen
  • Guidelines