In the salle sauvage, in the animal body of labor, women labored,                slept, recovered, up to five in a bed. Book-trained doctorsdelivered women of their babies with hands still slick and stained                from the autopsied bodies of mothers who’d diedhours earlier of childbed fever inside the same hot rooms. The doctors                blamed the mothers for their fevers: their split-open bodieswere filled with pus, and the men saw milk gone wandering,                rotten, clotted in the abdomen and intestines.The doctors blamed the women’s shame and worry, the lack of fresh air,                the sewer gas. They filled the wards with smoketo purify the air and walked unwashed between delivery room and morgue.                There are rooms where a woman’s rickets-narrowed pelvisis displayed in brine, where baby girls joined at the hip swim in a jar,                where a fetal skeleton is passed through a pelvic basinto show how birth is meant to work. The doctors were taught to deliver                without looking, to work in the dark, shieldedby huge sheets draped over mother and physician.                The women labor flat-backed in the stirrupped positionnamed for stones. The doctors wield forceps, from the Latin for                hot and seize, the paired spoons that scoop the babyfrom the birth canal, the way a line cook grabs a burger from the grill.                with tongs. Yanked from where I’d lodgedinside my mother’s narrow hips, collarbone broken,                but alive, redheaded, howling,I was born like that.