 Terri Linn Davis is Associate Editor for Five South and is an adjunct at Southern Connecticut State University where she teaches writing composition through essays on monster theory. She is the recipient of the Jack and Annie Smith Poets and Painters Award (2018). Her poems have most recently appeared in The Daily Drunk Mag, Janus Literary, Emerge Literary Journal, Ghost City Review and elsewhere. She has been invited to attend the 2022 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for poetry. Terri Linn lives in Connecticut with her co-habby and their three children. You can find her on Twitter @TerriLinnDavis and on her website www.terrilinndavis.com For the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
Mary Toft (1701–1763), was an English woman who created controversy when she convinced doctors that she had given birth to rabbits. This resulted in the ruin of several famous surgeons and the respect of the medical profession in general. In 1726 (after miscarrying), Mary Toft stuffed her wanting cervix and labored her full womb into a bucket-- giving life to three severed tabby legs and the backbone of an eel. Later, a local surgeon with thirty years of delivering mothers presumed to see for himself; he complained that Mary was sullen and stupid, until she writhed and pushed out a baby bunny. Before long, she’d birth seventeen rabbits—some without bodies—full of corn and hay, knife cleaved, half grown. England’s doctors believed Mary. For their children marked-- born cleft lipped and knock-kneed, born still, they knew the sin was a woman’s: imprinted by the intensity in which we watched the wasps hunt in the garden; the way, sometimes, our eyes never wavered whether they sampled Gladiolus or the rotting meat of field mice. After they delivered Mary of several pieces of flesh, she was captured, like Miller’s daughter, and she lay there day after day full fevered—barren. The king charged her as a vile cheat and imposter. They hid her in jail because the real tragedy was the mens’ reputations and the drop in meat sales—England too disgusted to cannibalize rabbit stew and jugged hare. I am like you, Mary, marked by blood feeling. I know the clotted milk of infection, the dead rabbits, the weight of it sewn in. I know: I know what it’s like to feel so empty you stuff whatever live thing you can find into the hollow space inside you.
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