The bee poems. “The Jailor.” “A Secret.” It didn’t surprise Sylvia that it was so often likened to childbirth. She’d thought the same, even as a teenager, smugly appropriating a metaphor she hadn’t earned. Even after the babies were born, she thought she knew. She didn’t know at all, until now. It was both—sex and birth. Sex—not the shared experience, but the private one. The pleading desperation, the sweaty fury, the greed, the full heat of surrender. But it was birth most of all. “Lesbos.” “A Birthday Present.” “Stopped Dead.” With Frieda, she’d had nothing for the pain, on her knees on the bedroom floor: its barreling, breathless violence unmitigated. Even with Nick, the midwife’s portable tank of gas had run out. Then she was pushing. This, too, was how she felt the poems: the brutality, wave after wave of it. And then, oh god, she felt the head. Were all the doors open? Were the windows? The plates of the skull folding, slipping tectonically like a world, to get through her bones. The thrill—it was irreducible, the only true thing. It was glorious.

Blood is pooling in the onions. Sue has the gauze, the root-beer glass tincture of iodine.

The blackberry blood of childbirth, richer than earth. Birth and poetry: the signs of her true womanhood smearing her thighs, dark drops on the plank floor of the guest room as she rises. Her body the body of a woman delivered, glowing in moonlight at her desk, the moon rising out of the yew beyond her study.

Sylvia takes a step back, steps in the dark drops of ruby blood on the kitchen linoleum. The decapitated cap of her thumb pulses under her fingertip, a little animal, with every beat of her heart. Sue holds the iodine, ready to douse Sylvia’s thumb.

“It’s going to hurt,” Sue warns.

Sylvia lifts her forefinger, sticky with blood. Holds out her thumb. At the first red splash of iodine, she winces. The sting, it’s real—

(Sue holds the bottle steady.)

Do it again.

12. “Elm”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Elm”

APRIL 19, 1962

COURT GREEN