
THE COST OF COFFINS
But the infant’s death is sheer, unmitigated waste—Marie Stopes “The Cost of Coffins”
JENNIFER GIVHAN
At the beginning of a century before women could vote
she wrote books teaching women how to use contraceptives
She studied medicine and became a doctor
while my great-great grandmothers were picking grapes and walnuts
in fields birthing baby after baby
One crossed the border pregnant to have her baby on this side
through desert through pitching heat
through sour-swollen night & animal bites & insect-
icides (infant-) But the infant in the dog kennel
I donate book royalties to try & save though that feels faceless
as Moses in a reedy raft— what of that child?
They found alligators in the Río Grande & God
my own brown babies are safe enough
for how long swimming in the public pool all summer
I hold only broken altars for the shame we’re carrying
for the twelve candles on my Jer Bear’s Cars cake
burning alongside the brackish earth of Tamir’s
& when it seems my heart can’t take
another fucking inch of this broken spoke that’s been
working like grease like oil in water for the well-
educated like that suffragette white
woman a century ago advocating
sterilization of poor
brown women
like the white women now who look at the pictures
of my ancestors’ children, my ancestors’ best
hope, face-down in the waters they sing
now gator-homes rather than the graveyard they made
with their indifference or their silent guilt or their
range of hate, and say, They’re not our children
when I cannot take them back into my broken
altar of a body, crossroads for hips, bone-splitting
for motherlove— all I can offer are prayers
to Santa Muerte herself, patron saint
of Death
& the deaths I’m asking for
aren’t ours.
JENNIFER GIVHAN, a Mexican-American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Rosa’s Einstein (Camino Del Sol Poetry Series, 2019), two chapbooks, and two novels, Trinity Sight and Jubilee, both forthcoming from Blackstone Press. Her poems have appeared in The Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetry, The New Republic, Crazyhorse, and Kenyon Review. She has received, among other honors, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, and New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, chosen by Tyehimba Jess.