the pain is so resplendent it has babies

Melissa Studdard
—Winner of The Penn Review’s 2019 Poetry Prize—

and its babies are so resplendent 
they have babies. Underage unwed
babies having babies. Someone has 
built their delivery room in my ribs, 
and without restraint they come and go
carrying babies that will birth more
babies in the parking lot before realizing
they are babies. Flamboyant babies,
refusing the swaddle of pink and blue. 
They leave the hospital in sequined 
evening gowns to perform the burlesque
of pain, and everyone in the audience 
has their shirts unbuttoned to nurse
the babies they carry everywhere.
And the speakers, instead of making 
sound, make babies, and the curtains
open and close on a pulley of pain 
operated by the babies, and when
the magician comes on she saws the pain 
in half and there are two more pains that
saw themselves in half and now the pain
knows how to saw itself to make more 
pain and there are pain babies everywhere 
and there are no rabbits or doves in the hat,
just more babies, and when the cocktail 
waitress comes around, she serves 
little cups of pain, shots of pain with pain 
backs on the rocks, and pain crudités 
on leafy green beds of pain, and when 
I try to leave the show to go home 
the emcee announces that I’m up next,
and I realize it was just me onstage 
all along, having babies and babies 
and more babies with no epidurals.
I realize it is me who has conceived, and 
mothered, and nurtured, my pain all along.