Fetal Position by Holly Melgard
“Does wanting a child feel similar to the want for simpler times? Like a pastoral craving to return to innocence or nature? Most of the time I wish I were camping. Is it like that? A real “ignorance is bliss” sort of vibe? Is that why people go for it?”
~ Reproductive Labour
Fetal Position (2021, Roof Books) is a collection of experimental poetry by American poet, artist and academic Holly Melgard. Melgard is the co-founder and editor of Troll Thread, an experimental and collectively run print on demand and .pdf platform. This collection brings together several of her chapbooks, as well as new work.
The poems that make up Fetal Position are titled “Reproductive Labour,” “Divisions of Labour,” “Child Labour,” “Student Labour,” “Lesser Person” and “Catcall,” and each explores different forms of invisible or precarious labour. Melgard focuses particularly on the sounds and contexts of domestic labour, which, under capitalism, is barely recognised as labour at all - whether it is the labour of giving birth, parenting, caretaking, teaching or looking after a pet. It brings to mind Dan Hogan’s Creepypasta and Astrid Lorange’s Labour and other Poems: playful, critical works that discuss and disect labour in its many iterations.
The first piece, "Reproductive Labour" is a series of rhetorical questions that aims to answer the question: "What does it feel like to know you want children?"
"Like, when you look at other people’s kids, do your loins start burning and dilating with want for something to come out of them? I can sort of imagine that. Does looking at a baby make your womb throb; your sperm squirm; your wallet pulse?"
She wonders: Is it a physical sensation, or a psychological craving? Is it about desiring gain, or avoiding loss? Does it feel like working one job instead of three? Is it about world-building or world ending? Or is it just about not being the first person who gets eaten during the apocalypse? The questioning is funny and provocative, but interrogates our anxiety (particularly for women) about having or not having children in a society that offers little support and is becoming less and less sustainable.
(The voice of the generation that has deferred parenthood could be the speaker in the final poem "Catcall," who communicates to their kitten only in baby-talk: a “cat-parent” to a “fur baby.”)
Voice and language are important in these pieces. In fact, Melgard first performed the poem "Divisions of Labour" to a live audience in 2012. It is a transcribed, alphabetised list of sounds uttered during dramatic portrayals of childbirth in YouTube videos. She begins at "A" and goes through each letter of the alphabet, down to "Y":
“a
ah
ahh
ahhhh
ahhhhhhhhhhhh
am
an
anesthesia
are
arrrrrrrrrrrr
asshole
ayahhhh
aye
ayyyy”
Interestingly, the performance of this piece made some of her audience mad. They complained that she had no "right" to the material because she was not a mother, and had "never been in labour before." This was surprising to Melgard, because, as she notes, "I definitely attended my own birth." She says:
"While not all women want, have, or can have children, and while not all primary parents/caretakers are moms, every person was once born and someone laboured over the making of them as people. All of us labour over the becoming of us, and all of us make choices every day that do/don’t subordinate the value of that labour to adjacent forms of capital."
Melgard also teaches writing at NYU and CUNY, and her piece "Student Labour" comprises fragments of communication between teacher and student. The tedious repetitions and falsely positive tone are all-too-familiar. It is exhausting and laborious: but this is the point.
“No no I’ll just get that from the email that I sent earlier and just copy it into a
And ok then, yeah. So that’s on its way then along with the rest of the
Yeah, no it is. No, exactly. No yeah no. No, I know. It is going to be amazing.
Yeah, no I can’t wait. No totally me too, super excited. And can’t wait for
Yes, also looking forward to more soon”
Melgard is bringing this ‘behind the scenes’ labour to the forefront. And perhaps the discomfort of the audience of “Divisions of Labour” is also due to what is considered "obscene" (the root of the word meaning "off stage") being brought into the spotlight. Particularly so in the poem "Child Labour," where pornographic descriptions of what it feels like to be inside a woman are cut-up and re-ordered to form a composite narration of vaginal childbirth from the fetal point of view (literally, the fetal position):
“What it felt like when I was inside of her” “The way she felt when I was inside of her” “—I mean,” “I never thought the stories were true until it happened to me.” “What it felt like to cum into her” “and when I came out of her”
The poem is bodily, taboo, transgressive, sexual - but it is also about finding language for invisible labour and these nascent experiences. As Audre Lorde says, “it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt."
Experimental poetry can do just that. Melgard uses this kind of language "to listen to and articulate the unsayables, the unfathomables and the under-intelligibles." Finding ways to express these things can be a necessary step in being able to imagine a different world where domestic labour is valued and validated, or to imagine actions we can take to change the way things are.
The cover of this collection may also be my favourite of the year (and designed by Melgard herself)! "Fetal Position" is written on a blackboard, while a teacher and students huddle beneath their desks with their hands over their heads - it is a scene of crisis, reminiscent of an earthquake, or, perhaps, a school shooting. In this case, to be in the fetal position is to protect yourself: a small, perhaps futile, gesture, but one of resistance.
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living on Gadigal land (Sydney). She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices and create a space for creative community. You can say hi at emily@anikopress.com.