IN THE ANATOMICAL MUSEUM

Past the skull collection, wax model of a gangrene hand
in a specimen jar to the "Plates Illustrative of a Treatise on
   Midwifery, 1813"—

Leonet forceps, decapitating hook "used to extract the child
by the head from the maternal passage"

Or the umbilical cord with 26 twists. Or the placenta molded
    from paraffin.
I am looking for the Labor Scene.

Not the instruments: blade, shank, lock: but the women
holding each other, the women delivering—

Not my dream last night that I was pregnant for the third time
but there was no baby

there would be no "obstetrical interventions" to remove this body
from my body. I would not go down to that place

I'd traveled twice. I would not return
to Cervadil, Pitocin drip, to the birthing room where I had failed,

lifted off the bed on a rubber sheet and wheeled to the surgical
   theater
where the nurses tied down my hands

where I breathed the plastic shell of an oxygen mask.
On the second floor the curator draped

a wax model in muslin to resemble a patient on a table,
body for the surgeon to unfold. That place I'd traveled—

a hundred years ago I would not have come back—
Now my two girls running on the lawn beyond

the museum, behind the black gate, my girls
who refuse to be bodiless.