“Bad Medicine” 2nd Place Winner

Vampire Diaries—An Ectopic Meditation

by Caroline Williams

Editor’s Note

This poem is one that demands to be read multiple times, ideally out loud—first, to experience the barrage of emotions the speaker conveys (rage, guilt, sorrow, frustration), and then to appreciate the craft of it, from its use of white space to the way the poem builds so much meaning into the final two words, “to live.” Ectopic pregnancies are life-threatening and are not viable, but the experience of loss—on both a physical and psychological level—can be deeply traumatic. “Vampire Diaries—An Ectopic Meditation” is about that loss and the complicated weight it carries.

Part I

I keep saying my body ate my baby
my body ate
my baby my body
ate my baby ate my body—

my baby ain’t a body
can’t say
_______can’t say baby
can’t say my baby—
_______________wasn’t no living thing
_______________just a will kill you cluster
_______________a lethal / abstract / mass
oh Lord
_______I’m not trying to wallow
not trying to hurt no feelings
______________________say nothing aimed at nothing
Lord don’t you know
_______I’m just trying
to understand my monster
______________________________oh
it is monstrous
_______I took poison
said no to the dividing cells
______________________oh
don’t you know
_______they kill your baby (not a baby)
like it’s cancer
______________if it’s in your tubes
or they cut it out
and give you a report
______________________pediatric pathology
_____________________it says
_____________________________pediatric
_____________________like a baby but
it’s not a baby and will kill you and
don’t you know
_______it is monstrous / I said look at me
I am a monster
______________and
Doctor says
_______take a seat.
______________This is a body
_____________________divided from you—
For what? For forgiveness? For sins?
_______What sin in all this?
_______What sin? What body?

Part II

God knows—he really does
I have stolen husbands
I have failed my students
I have had a drink when I should
have gone instead to sleep
I have not called my grandmother
when she has left message
after message after message
to say she misses me please call
and I can feel her getting old and
_____________________this is my blood which is shed for you
_____________________for the forgiveness of sins
this is all of our blood / shed
all of our sins / plead for and
all of the quiet poems / at the center
of my faith
______________my many meditations
______________said again and again

and I promised daddy I would not be
a sinner would be a good
______________and grateful girl

but Lord I have fractured them promises
have sinned and shed blood for it
and look now
______________at that would be body
_______of my blood
all ate up to save my life—
Am I a selfish girl?
______________What looks like living?
Say
_______Eat the body /
drink the blood / for forgiveness—
_____________________my God
_____________________my God
your premise
has forsaken me /
______________had to
______________eat my own baby
______________drink my own blood
to live

Caroline Williams

“Bad Medicine” 2nd Place Winner

Caroline Randall Williams is a multi-genre writer, educator, performer, and a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. She hosts the Viola Davis-produced Discovery+ series Hungry for Answers and co-authored the NAACP Image Award-winning cookbook Soul Food Love. Her debut poetry collection, Lucy Negro, Redux, became a Nashville Ballet production scored by Rhiannon Giddens and filmed for PBS’s Great Performances, in which she performs. Named among Southern Living’s “50 People Changing the South” and The Root’s 100 most influential African Americans of 2020, she has been published in many outlets, including The Iowa Review, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.

Vampire Diaries—An Ectopic Meditation

Caroline Williams

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