It has been difficult for me to write about Hysterical Pregnancy. A similar difficulty to writing the book this poem comes from. The physical act of writing is never so much the issue but the process of finding the words—the waiting for words to come when I didn’t want to describe the circumstances I was writing about. It was perhaps an unconscious protest. My cognitive capacity failing to produce the language that would make reality more real than it already was.
To write about Hysterical Pregnancy is to write about the circumstances in which the piece was created. This is the last poem I wrote for a book I began six years ago. I finished writing in Michigan listening to the lake crashing into the shore. A relentless sound making my tinnitus flair. The lake was warmer than it should have been. Evidenced by the neon green algae that glazed the water’s surface. Dead monarch butterflies scattered the beach. Their resting place hundreds of thousands of miles away from their intended terminus.
I was writing by the edge of a once healthy lake. A lake that once froze over in the winter with ice so thick you could drive a truck across it. Now a place where snow isn’t a guarantee in late December because of greenhouse gas. I was writing in a State that was once “blue.” Where once abortion was not contested. This “where” was within my lifetime. My lifetime has not been so long.
Hysterical Pregnancy comes from a book entitled Fecund. In October 2018 a poem came out as a prayer against the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Often writing is like a brief deluge and then the tap is turned off. There is language. And then there isn’t. I recognized that with Kavanaugh’s confirmation the anti-abortion movement was winning in a judicially recognizable way. That the conservative strategy to deny reproductive freedom was in essence ending its ugly labor. Roe was precarious. Kavanaugh made it terminal.
I wrote thinking about my potentiality. The bulk of fecundity. The autonomy in biological response. I was writing about the limits of control. I was choked too. There is little other than bleakness in articulating grief. Sickness at dismantled healthcare systems. Politics touches everything. I didn’t want to be touched. I felt my hands shaking, trying to clutch onto a moving pram that was forever just out of my reach. I am writing, and continue to write, with sadness and upset and the emotional intensity of anger.
Hysterical Pregnancy is biographical. A dredge from an earlier time. Remembering myself in a different form. My body has saved and failed me. It is the unevenness of self that makes life so imperceptible. We are not ever out of sight from ourselves, but never fully in sight either. Pregnancy investigates the limits of selfhood. The ways we are both our own and not our own. I am hysterical. I am trying to articulate this. That the body is hysterical in its eruption of uncontrolled and exaggerated expression. That pregnancy is hysterical. I am trying to write that the body is ungovernable. Fertility demonstrates this.
Katie Ebbitt is a poet/psycho-behavioralist living in NYC. She is the author of the chapbooks ANOTHER LIFE (Counterpath, 2016), Para Ana (Inpatient, 2019), Air Sign (Creative Writing Department, 2024) and Hysterical Pregnancy (above/ground press, 2024). Fecund, her first full-length book, will be released by Keith LLC.
