[Mary Toft (1701–1763) claimed, after miscarrying a child, to be capable of birthing rabbits.]  

I am trying to articulate loss 

whilst in the grasp of a triumphant doctor  

who thinks I am a miracle.

//  

Joshua Toft is out buying rabbits,  

small and young, pink-nosed and  

pie-bred. He brings them home to  

an ill-lit kitchen, on the table  

butchers them. He doesn’t like to  

do it – not soft, more the sight of  

all that meat, and none of it for  

eating. His belly rumbles, but  

his wife will have her schemes.  

She looks, now, only at the wall,  

won’t touch her children,  

feral in the yard. She wanted four.  

This way, at least, they might weigh  

their depth of grief against a little gain.  

// 

Whatever trick it takes to make 

men listen

I perform

birthing butchered rabbits until the lie 

gives out. Reading every recent paper  

so that they assume I am a doctor, too  

Beheld in incredulity

the easiest way to gain audience 

with those too busy for the everyday tragedy

//  

A rabbit can most humanely be killed  

by stunning, then severing its arteries.  

A rabbit can most humanely be killed  

by a bullet to the brain.  

A rabbit can most humanely be killed  

by the husband of a woman in Godalming,  

who turns the organs wrong-side-out  

and leaves them at her door.  

A rabbit can resemble a baby.  

A rabbit can resemble a miracle.  

A rabbit can emerge from the womb of a woman  

most closely resembling a fact.  

A doctor is worth only his last diagnosis,  

regardless of his position in the king’s favour.  

A woman’s place is in the gossip papers.  

A woman’s place is in the examination room,  

turning king and country tongue-tied, to un-jug  

a nation’s worth of hares.  

For best effect, use the head of a rabbit,  

the feet of a rabbit. The tail is a risk, the  

lower digestive tract might reveal faecal matter:  

a problem of reputation, a problem of truth.  

You can hold them in, whilst 

sophisticated hands examine you, sophisticated

men  take instruments and check you for their

knighthoods.  

A dead child is a small loss. A dead rabbit is a

great  mystery. If anyone speaks of the

madness of grief,  

let them speak of the men who held their breath,

and  crossed their better judgement, persuaded

kings  

that women – who are made of baser stuff –  

give birth to what it is they most look on.  

//  

behold the body so broken  

that over and over again,

it ruins what it has grown. Moon 

light, the thin voice on the emergency line  

utter refusal  

to believe you until morning 

//  

Flesh decays in this age of science, regardless of salt, of cinnamon, 

of climbing smoke. You cannot smudge the stink from existence. 

Even from beneath your skirt, the smell of dead meat climbs – 

hard to believe in daisies when the very notion rots  

at field-edges.  

When you have lost a child, all is dung  

and devastation, why not rudely joint a rabbit, stuff it there  

instead, inside your still-distended emptiness? And if men

arrive  from town, carrying reports, eager to watch you writhe agonic, 

why not entertain them?  

Perhaps they’ve never watched ewes  

lose their lambs, six-legged and wrong, or seen a hare after it  

has been dogged, or seen a child come before its term. If they 

cannot tell the difference between nine rabbits and a baby boy, 

if the King believes you’ve taken too much looking to yourself, 

who are you to tilt the moon back right? You have writhed  

for hours in the company of sympathetic women, and they  

never wrote papers on you.  

And if it tumbles – when – they realise  

that the rabbits ate outside you, that they ran in sunshine before 

they were swallowed by the great grave of you – it won’t be you 

who looks an idiot. It won’t be you who twisted earth and sky 

so you could say, with a straight face, that you once met a woman, 

a human woman who could produce rabbits from within herself.  

//  

– she and I share them,  

centuries apart and both of us perform whatever miserable  

magic-trick  

which permits the nurse to say

‘we’ll let  

the doctor see you now. That might be serious.’