The First Time I Gave Birth
ELIZABETH RAE BULLMER
Pain made me delirious. The women I worked with became a clucking brood of hens dropping seeds at my feet. When I refused to bend and eat, the batty birds chased me to the hospital where Nurse Ratched tied me down in a circus tent and popped the water balloon I’d been living in. During the flood that followed, clowns rehearsing for their big act piled in and out. A tiny man, with an enormous light-bulb nose, juggled vials and syringes; his grin came and went like a Cheshire cat. My brother-in-law appeared from a magic box wearing a velvet cape and a top hat, yelling Opa! or Mazel tov! in Portuguese, and the nursing staff stopped dancing mid-chorus line when I suddenly shouted my daughter’s exact birth weight in ounces—as if I already felt the full measure of what I had lost.
ELIZABETH RAE BULLMER has been writing since the age of seven. Bullmer’s work has appeared in Pensive, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Cloudbank, Sky Island Journal, Her Words, Anacapa Review, and The Awakenings Review. Her most recent chapbook is Skipping Stones on the River Styx. She’s a licensed massage/sound therapist, facilitates writing/healing workshops, serves on two community poetry boards, and is the mother of two phenomenal humans, living with three fantastic felines in Kalamazoo.
