Birth control 

We begin with the viral video of the anaconda

in New England giving birth to her exact genetic copies

because she’s never even seen a male snake

in all her eight years behind glass.

The headlines are calling it a virgin birth.

I watched the video this morning—

now everywhere I turn, a Madonna, a snake.

Oh, Rome, how you worship your silk-hipped mothers!

You heap your offerings of smoke and ash, your hard heels

of bread. This church is just another Santa Maria 

with an old woman in a shawl

and a takeaway coffee cup

shaking outside.

*

At the Vatican yesterday, I wondered

if he-who-sees-everything could see the small t-shaped 

thing inside me. I walked through the metal detectors and bag-check

and had the surreal thought that the Pope

might sweep down to deny me entry

like Jesus in The Last Judgment.

When I first had it inserted, I bled for a month and ruined

all the underwear I owned, even 

though I rinsed them in cold water first

the way my mother taught me. 

Every day I’d think it’d stopped, but it kept coming—

Mary’s stigmata, Eve’s—relentless

like the blood after birth—

uterus closing like a fist

with nails cutting into the palm.

In the Vatican there is so much art, so much wealth,

but what I notice is the absence of Madonnas. 

Every wall in Rome is frescoed with Marys

except here, the holy centre.

*

At home, my daughter, who has grown

so tall so quickly it looks like someone has grabbed her

at either end and pulled, starts taking the pill

to manage her bleeding.

Six months ago she was innocent as grass. 

Seems like every initiation into womanhood is an initiation

into pain. Into seeing the other women

busying around us, bruising hips

on the corners of tables,

gasping in the bathroom as their stitches tear—

trying to hold back the knowledge of it, doing their best

always, always rubbing honey into the wound, almond

butter into the cracks in their hands, delivering us

into the knowledge of blood. 

*

In this church the colours are fairy floss and hayfever

and bubble-gum flavoured milk but Byzantine.

The gold is so bright that we glow a bit, even though we joked

about burning up as we walked in. If god made gold, it was

definitely for this—to dazzle us into a submissive kind of belief.

But, later, all these churches later, what I remember

is the fresco of the one woman with her arms held wide

trying to call her companions

to order, like Bitches, please,

and that poor woman

on her left with a toddler and a baby on her lap

each clamouring for a breast.

Another woman seems to be resting a sandalled foot

casually on the decapitated head of a man. Her robe

drapes a bit in the blood, but she’s too deep in conversation

to notice that. On the far side of the group 

the woman in blue has her arm raised

to receive a raven while she whispers in her friend’s ear.

This is the pastel chaos of womanhood. And behind them

all in black, a neat semicircle of men.  

*

 What’s helpful is to know what the line ‘Blessed be

the fruit’ actually means. It’s what the serpent said to Eve

just before she bit—what Eve said to Adam

juice dripping down her chin. 

*

In Rome, outside every church are four or five

armed soldiers and a jeep, spilling ash from their cigarettes

between the cobblestones, watching. Kitset boys in camouflage

and blood-red berets.

I sit on the steps of the fountain and google the church—

the first church in Rome dedicated to Mary, it holds the head

of the virgin martyr Saint Apollonia. But before that 

it was a pagan temple dedicated to Carmenta —

goddess of childbirth, prophecy and technical innovation.

Inventor of the Latin alphabet.

And the old woman, begging outside? One of the soldiers

calls her Maria and hands her a bomboloni

wrapped in a paper napkin.

*

The light around the broken temple of the virgins

is orange and thick. If the flame went out, the women

were blamed for being unchaste. Whoever the culprit—

she was buried alive with just enough apricots and milk

to make the death a low-angled wasting. What would her heart

do, while her face was pulling back into its bones? She

would cry, and you would too, for spending your life

a servant to fire, and never knowing

how it felt to burn. 

*

Parthenogenesis is the ancient word for a virgin birth—

not magic, but a well-documented biological process

in many plants and animals. Typically, what has happened

is that if men can’t explain a thing, they call it witchcraft

and destroy it. There is a hymn for everything here 

and this is the hymn for days made narrow through lack

of sleep. This is the hymn for the good-bad gift

of knowing.         

Hannah Mettner

Hannah is a Wellington-based poet from Tūranganui-a-Kiwa. Her first collection, Fully Clothed and so Forgetful (VUP 2017), was longlisted for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry. With Sugar Magnolia Wilson and Morgan Bach, she is one of the founding editors of Sweet Mammalian, so especially excited to have work published in it for the first time!