your best post-baby body
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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. |
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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.