1.<\/p>\n
Kane\u2019s death horrifies: pinned to a table, riven mid-scream, he births the Alien\u2019s infant. Pregnant for the first time when I first watched that scene, I noted the room\u2019s white-padded sterility and fluorescent lighting, so like the labor and delivery wing I\u2019d toured recently. But bipedal vagina dentatae impregnating men? I rolled my eyes as my husband clutched his abdomen.<\/p>\n
Though I dismiss my own pain, too, or forget\u2014not its chronology or how it compels me to silence, but its brutal margins. After, I cannot give it any but the most common name: \u201cpain,\u201d gone suddenly and wholly as it came.<\/p>\n
My first labor, the contractions built for a night, then a day, wringing me till I writhed. To what pitch would they intensify? Would the child wedge against my pelvis? Would a doctor cut me open? Would I be scarred, stretched, ugly, incontinent?<\/p>\n
Nothing had prepared me. The only wisdom my mother offered came before my first period. Mom sighed: \u201cSex can be pleasant.\u201d Pushing her cuticles back, she added, \u201cBut it will hurt the first time. The pill causes cancer. Condoms rip. You\u2019ll get pregnant, and having a baby feels like a colossal bowel movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet labor, I found, feels nothing like defecation. John Hurt\u2019s mock convulsions play as more accurate. Agony increased with each muscle spasm, rushing through and beyond me. I vomited, wet my mouth, and vomited. I walked, sat, turned, crouched, but nothing dulled the wrest and squeeze, the force (me, and not me) driving a life from my body.<\/p>\n
My doula pressed, \u201cFind a position to bring you pain. Pain opens your body.\u201d I found it on my hands and knees. I could neither weep nor scream because it took everything in me to breathe, to bear it. I felt the limits of the body, how a mother or child could die in that violent parting, the water which cradled Elle gone (dripping, dripping all along), her skull pressed to my pelvic bones: an impasse, a physical impossibility. I retched with every wrenching, could no longer speak through torment and dehydration, dozed face-to-floor between contractions.<\/p>\n
When we at last drove to the hospital, I leaned into a second night, IV in my arm to feed rather than relieve the wild aching which would tell me when to push, when to breathe. Elle\u2019s body bound within me, my body heaved. B crouched beside me and spoke, though I did not listen, knew nothing but presence. I knelt on the bed, rocked on its edge, walked to the bend of collapse\u2014till the worst broke (and remade, but broke) me.<\/p>\n
Pushing, my jaw pulsed, fingers cricked from gripping sheets, the whites of my eyes reddened with burst capillaries. I lost time and forgot my shame at being naked and grunting. I saw no one in that crowded room except B and the strange doctor, standing in for the midwife (who\u2019d promised to come, but didn\u2019t). This man paced, eyed the clock, forced his finger in my ass without asking. He told his male resident, \u201cI don\u2019t know why it works, but these women don\u2019t know how to bear down on the right thing.\u201d To me: \u201cPush, or a cesarean will be necessary.\u201d I pushed, pushed through searing till I split and Elle burst, wailing, from me.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
If Kane\u2019s end seems an appropriation, I can at least believe in Ripley\u2019s grit: how she arcs beyond a horror-movie death, passing from innocence to courage derived from experience.<\/p>\n
After Elle\u2019s birth, I crafted a poem from my horror and astonishment. A female editor asked me to revise it for publication, then reneged, writing, \u201cYou\u2019d never want your daughter to read this.\u201d Did she reject pieces about war, crime, and environmental destruction because their narratives would scare children? Or is it only mothers who must turn their art into bedtime stories? I want Elle to know I fought for her and that she, too, might bleed and vomit\u2014but she can bring miracles into her hands. Even the Alien fights for her children.<\/p>\n
After birthing four babies, I remain a force (if curvier and more anxious). I want Elle and Lia to know the power of their bodies and for Pax and Teddy to see a woman\u2019s substance. For my daughters (teens now), I point out fictions: birthing children marks a woman as weak, her self-corruption via blood and amniotic fluid proof of her animalism. Also: we must labor within male institutions, hospital wards created and still (mostly) run by men, cover our lady parts while our feet rest in stirrups\u2014after, wipe clean our crotches and shroud our breasts as our babies eat from them.<\/p>\n
I refuse these falsehoods now. But when first pregnant, afraid of being cut, of being deemed incompetent to protest that decision, I thanked that doctor for allowing me to labor four hours between arriving at the hospital and delivering my infant. I tucked the sheet up to cover my bloody thighs and thanked him.<\/p>\n
But how could a man speak of my unreliable instincts? How could he presume my body felt alien to me, when he demanded I push not on my knees, as I wanted, but on my back? How could he enter my body without consent?<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t seen a male doctor since. But my other labors were also painful and protracted. \u201cAnything for a minute,\u201d I repeated through contractions. \u201cI can bear anything for a minute.\u201d Eighteen hours for Lia, ten for Pax, eleven for Teddy, hopeless in the span of spasms that pressed me against the impossible, certain my skin would split or be scalpelled open, certain no body could pass through the gate of my pelvis. Minutes lost meaning against nerves pulsing: \u201cStop, stop, make it stop.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even my cries, low and rough, sounded alien. My voice trembled for days after each delivery, vocal cords ravaged.<\/p>\n
Why, then, labor unmedicated? Because I could immediately stand, carry my child, bathe and dress. If Ripley\u2019s victory comes in avoiding impregnation, she still blows up her spaceship to save herself and her ward, Jonesy the cat. I, too, needed to know I could run, if required, from fire or flood or a doctor\u2019s imperious demands, newborn tucked to my chest.<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Infants are inscrutable as Ripley\u2019s cat\u2014but winsome, not alien. The months of gestation, I spoke to them as I traced the tracks of their feet, jutting for elusive instants above the horizon of my stomach. I knew them, as they knew me, when they bobbed against my breast and quieted at the taste of my colostrum.<\/p>\n
We were delivered, and the forgetting began. Four times, I\u2019ve examined my newborn\u2019s loveliness, eyes wide and watching, fixing me in wonder so I am not only what I have been but also \u201cMother.\u201d B touched, with a trembling fingertip, our daughter\u2019s neck, the down on our son\u2019s back. We lay in the pink of love and creation, our first day (still night) and light first touching our infant\u2019s face. Our language savaged, then salvaged to parse pain and amazement: \u201cBaby, our baby,\u201d whispered against a sweet-scented head.<\/p>\n
People call this scent the infant\u2019s, but the mother\u2019s amniotic fluid saturates the baby\u2019s skin. So fleeting, this intimate perfume: Teddy (last of my children), not yet a month old, smells only of warmth and milky spit. Nursing him, rocking him, walking him to sleep as we spin toward darkness and back to sunlight again, I press my nose to his crown, attempting contact with the world I hold within. But the connection\u2019s broken.<\/p>\n
Forgetting\u2019s essential, though: that\u2019s how one chooses to do it again. Longing for the scent of myself melded with bald newness, a body fit to my arm\u2019s cradle, a mouth made for my breast, I dismiss faint remembrances: weeping as Elle wailed at 4 a.m., falling down steps in sleepless delirium while rushing to Pax. I deny menstrual cramps, then Braxton Hicks, as portents of pain to come (though only as sweeping a palm over flame augurs the heat of rocketing into the sun). I tell myself that suffering\u2019s peripheral, alien.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
2.<\/p>\n
I read, years after first viewing the movie, Dan O\u2019Bannon wrote Alien<\/em>\u2019s chest-burster scene following an acute flare-up of his Crohn\u2019s Disease. Still, I cannot dismiss the thought of abdomens bisected during cesareans.<\/p>\n A third of American pregnancies end with C-sections. Locally, hospitals\u2019 C-section rates vary from seven to seventy percent; the medical needs of various female populations cannot explain this. The World Health Organization estimates only ten to fifteen percent of births necessitate such interventions. But doctors bill more for surgical deliveries, which require less time than natural labors.<\/p>\n During my deliveries, nurses and residents stood in the rooms\u2019 margins to observe the alien mother, refusing interventions.<\/p>\n Possible complications of cesareans for infants: breathing problems, being cut by the surgeon. For mothers: infection, hemorrhage, reaction to anesthesia, surgical injuries to the uterus or surrounding organs, an unplanned hysterectomy, blood clots, depression or post-traumatic stress, sexual dysfunction, difficulty delivering future children.<\/p>\n Yet, doctors offer the procedure as safe and convenient, treating women\u2019s bodies as expendable incubators for offspring who will inherit the planet. It\u2019s not monsters we birth, but monsters who attend our labors, scalpels in hands.<\/p>\n Female obstetricians perform cesareans twenty-five percent less often. But half of American OB-GYNs are men; when Alien <\/em>premiered, that number stood near ninety percent. The movie\u2019s birth-scene carnage repeats daily, multiplied by thousands, except women splay on tables, male doctors slicing their skin, muscles, and uteruses for scheduling convenience or to ward off litigation risks or because women have bought into myths of their bodies\u2019 weaknesses, lies about vaginas being permanently stretched by babies\u2019 heads, fears that the sexual pleasures they offer men might be lessened.<\/p>\n While pregnant with Elle, I watched Weeds<\/em>, a show created, written, and run by a woman. The heroine tells a man who propositions her, \u201cI just had a baby. It would be like throwing a hot dog down a hallway.\u201d<\/p>\n But no: the vagina\u2019s elastic. Ripley would know about Kegel exercises.<\/p>\n 3.<\/p>\n Like the Alien\u2019s gaping mouth-within-a-mouth, the spaceship Nostromo is termed \u201cvaginal,\u201d its corridors dimly lit, humid, claustrophobic. A tortured metaphor: the velvet inches between a labia\u2019s bloom and cervix\u2019s pursed lips are nothing like a spaceship\u2019s labyrinthine passages with right angles forged of steel and plastic. Do movie critics never kneel at the portals of creation?<\/p>\n B knelt before me, I before him: the origin our children. How alien, then, to enter each pregnancy\u2019s final trimester struggling to stir at B\u2019s touches. With the first pregnancy, I lost my orgasm at seven months to a pinched spine and baby kicks and positions made impractical by my body\u2019s transformation. As our two-week-old slept in her bassinette, I regained it, climaxing from grinding and groping like B and I were college kids.<\/p>\n A friend confided she and her husband barely had sex during her pregnancy, and she felt no desire the year she nursed her baby. Another waited five months after she\u2019d given birth due to fear, though of what she didn\u2019t say. I mumbled that B and I took just \u201ca pause,\u201d not wanting to sound depraved.<\/p>\n More determined in my second pregnancy, I googled \u201cbest third-trimester sex positions,\u201d attempting \u201cscissors\u201d and \u201cspoons\u201d and bending over the bed. I kept my climax until the last weeks, when I went listless with exhaustion from baby weight and summer heat.<\/p>\n A third time pregnant, in our mid-30\u2019s, B and I agreed we couldn\u2019t give up months of good sex: we felt our bodies changing, necks sore after sleep, cricks in our backs and knees. The limits of the pleasure we could take from our aging bodies rose as specters, driving us to more sex. Often, as B kissed my scalp and cradled my belly, whispering everything and nothing, I came to our slow rhythms. After I birthed Pax, I\u2019d watch him smile in his sleep, wondering if my orgasms\u2019 chemical residual wired his brain for happiness.<\/p>\n With the fourth? Fifteen pounds heavier than at my previous pregnancies\u2019 inceptions, I battled gain by ounces. In the final weeks, my back twinged when I rolled in bed. I slept by fits, woke to phantom contractions and wondered: did I possess the strength to strive for my life and the infant\u2019s? After, could I will myself slim, quick, and potent? Consumed by this, I struggled to climax.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u201cNever\u201d: my mother\u2019s favorite avowal. During each of my pregnancies, she repeated, \u201cI<\/em> never waddled, even nine months in.\u201d<\/p>\n A relief, then, she didn\u2019t visit during my final trimester of pregnancy with Teddy. I waited, when I stood, for my spine to straighten and the baby to rise slightly off my cervix. I walked with a hand propping my lower back. I weakened as the days dragged and paused to catch my breath each time I climbed a flight of steps.<\/p>\n I regained my grace after giving birth, but I\u2019ll never look like Ripley as she leans against the geometric frame of her spaceship, scant curves clad in a cropped tank and tiny underpants, skin and garments gleaming white in the vessel\u2019s darkness, proving false comparisons between caliginous cargo bays and the form of a woman. The work of creation marks me: loose skin and a thick waist, diastasis recti and an innie-become-outie.<\/p>\n Still, weeks after each delivery, B and I returned to breathlessly disrobing in the minutes while our infant napped, examining one another\u2019s bodies as if they contained newness and finding they did. When he drew near a month after Teddy\u2019s birth, his hand cupping my hip, I imagined myself one of Rubens\u2019s Graces, ignoring the parts of me turned alien.<\/p>\n 4.<\/p>\n For six months, only B knew about my last pregnancy. I wore tunics and let people believe I\u2019d surrendered to a slowing metabolism. After we told our children, I asked if they\u2019d guessed my condition. \u201cLots of people are fat,\u201d Lia shrugged, patting my hand.<\/p>\n The malice of other women: \u201cYour ankles look swollen,\u201d or, by my seventh month, \u201cDue any day? Carrying twins?\u201d<\/p>\n Worse, their condescension: \u201cSo cute,\u201d crooned moms of our kids\u2019 friends and strangers in the market. An elderly lady poked my protruding belly button, cooing, \u201cBeep-beep.\u201d \u201cA miracle,\u201d a friend cried, as if, like Sarah, God blessed me with conception at age ninety.<\/p>\n Men took two tacks: staring at my stomach, or refusing to acknowledge it. A stooped retiree, passing me and my children on the street, grumbled, \u201cOne more, and you\u2019d have a hockey team.\u201d A college kid, bagging my groceries, asked, \u201cDoes it hurt, or do you just feel bloated?\u201d One of my husband\u2019s colleagues focused on a spot over my shoulder for the duration of a ten-minute conversation.<\/p>\n Alien to others, alien to myself: big-bellied, swaybacked. Restless legs prevented sleep till I\u2019d watched the clock pass 1 a.m., and then I startled awake at the sound of my own snorting, labored breath. Come morning, I rolled from bed and lumbered downstairs, sullen.<\/p>\n But, pregnant, my body fulfilled its intent: curved, broad, and obvious in its work of invention. I was expected to eat, to move with a languid fluidity, to sleep and sleep. My worth uncoupled from the size of my jeans and whether strange men wanted me. A minor goddess, I walked unmolested in my altered beauty.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n In total, I\u2019ve been pregnant three years\u2014nothing in comparison to how long I\u2019ll live, love B, be a mother and grandmother, write poetry. Strange then, how those four interludes\u2014and their aftermath\u2014define my body. I don\u2019t gape at my fingers, quick and strong from tying my daughters\u2019 braids and typing stanzas. I dismiss my legs, muscled from walking daily. But that handful of loose skin I can pinch up from my belly, how my breasts sag after each year of nursing\u2014the flaws obsess me. I think of the tight stomach and thigh-gap of my twenties as defining my \u201creal\u201d body.<\/p>\n An Alien queen can detach her ovipositor, reverting to her wasp-waisted weight in order to fight or flee. I ran for years, though I hate running, and kept caloric counts. One winter, I ate measured bowls of Special K for breakfast and lunch. I lost the baby weight twice, came close after Pax. But I gave away my college-era pants, their hip-hung waists highlighting my abdomen\u2019s slack.<\/p>\n This body carries me, but it\u2019s grotesque, a shadow of linea nigra leading to an unraveled navel. In the weeks after Teddy\u2019s birth, blood slicked my thighs as I rose from the bath. \u201cCall,\u201d the nurse said, \u201cif you soak more than one pad an hour or pass clots bigger than plums.\u201d<\/p>\n By the fourth week post-partum, the bleeding stopped. I put on lipstick, camouflaged flab with spandex undergarments, wore pants with a high waist\u2014everything in black, though Pax pointed out, \u201cIf this is for our Christmas card, you should wear green or red.\u201d Turning my hip and angling my chin for the camera, I appeared photogenic beside my photogenic husband and children. Pearl earrings, big smile: nothing alien.<\/p>\n I remind myself: my body doesn\u2019t have to be flawless for me to enjoy the ocean swirling around my shins or the sunny warmth of a child\u2019s arms around my neck. I need not be Ellen Ripley to lose myself in B\u2019s touch, then climax.<\/p>\n But when he caresses my stomach, I suck in or turn on my back so it appears concave. I insist on staying in a bustier, though he fumbles with its clasps. Alien, this pocket of skin covering emptiness, a place where babies fit but never will again.<\/p>\n 5.<\/p>\n A fourth pregnancy draws apathy, even admonishment. After our announcement, friends murmured, \u201cHow wonderful,\u201d but their uncomposed faces asked: \u201cWhy? Who needs four kids? At your age?\u201d<\/p>\n My mother claimed to be ecstatic. But, years ago, she remarked on her friend, past age forty and pregnant: \u201cWhat\u2019s she thinking, with the chances of a birth defect? And there\u2019s no way she\u2019ll keep up with a kid.\u201d<\/p>\n When I was young and asked for a baby sister, Mom frowned: \u201cI grew up one of seven. I never wanted a pack of snot-nosed kids.\u201d I guess my two brothers and I didn\u2019t constitute a pack (though, each winter, our noses dripped). Add a baby, and we would have?<\/p>\n When my belly button unfurled during my last pregnancy, its only remnant a pink dot to mark my stomach\u2019s apex, it seemed a dispossession: I\u2019d lost a guidepost to the past, tiny whorl in which I dug my finger as a child, plumbing the port of connection to my mother. Why care, after she told Pax, when he asked over the phone if she\u2019d help him \u201ctake care of Mommy,\u201d she\u2019d \u201cdandle an infant but not a full-grown woman\u201d? But I long for her support\u2014no, her devotion. I grumbled to B, \u201cShe could come over and make a meal or do the damn dishes.\u201d<\/p>\n Umbilicoplasty returns a belly button to its pre-pregnancy appearance. A tummy tuck may also be indicated. Two thousand to eighteen thousand dollars, with possible surgical complications\u2014but, it\u2019s a fix. There\u2019s none for my mother, grown alien.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Dad admonished, shortly after Pax\u2019s birth, \u201cTwo kids would\u2019ve been better for the planet.\u201d Neither of my brothers texted a congratulations on my fourth pregnancy\u2014nor my sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, high school best friend. One of B\u2019s co-workers slapped him on the back: \u201cHow many personal space invaders is this? Seven?\u201d<\/p>\n The average American family has 1.9 children. Alien, to want more, and to home-school them. \u201cI could never do it,\u201d people sniff.<\/p>\n Eyeing my protruding belly and three kids, a woman with six children approached me at a playground. She peppered her talk with references to Jesus and Trump, assuming like-mindedness. She jettisoned me from her Facebook friends after I confessed my lack of church attendance.<\/p>\n We have too many children for some people\u2019s tastes. For others: the right number, for the wrong reasons.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n After Teddy\u2019s birth, my parents visited. Dad held the baby and read books to the older kids. Mom laid Teddy across her lap: \u201cLooks like an alien. But all newborns do. His ears don\u2019t stick out.\u201d (What if they did?) \u201cAmazing,\u201d she murmured. I heard the \u201cespecially at your age\u201d she left unsaid.<\/p>\n 6.<\/p>\n The statistics: women under age thirty have a twenty-five percent chance of getting pregnant naturally each cycle; over thirty, it\u2019s a twenty-percent chance; by forty, it\u2019s five percent. But, at ages twenty-nine and thirty-one, I\u2019d conceived daughters within two weeks of going off the pill. With Pax, it took six weeks. Friends took months or years to conceive. I felt myself the exception.<\/p>\n Then, I asked my midwife to remove an IUD just after I turned forty. B and I neither tried to get pregnant nor to prevent it. Nothing happened. We tried in earnest. Nothing happened.<\/p>\n Sometimes, I felt a child moving in my abdomen, a body twisting and kicking beneath my stomach: a phantom baby. I desired a child with a ferocity that set my nerves on edge.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n After sixteen months of trying to get pregnant, approaching and retreating from accepting I wouldn\u2019t, we vacationed in the Badlands. Walking a butte\u2019s ridge, feet stirring dust between sparse grasses, coal smoke rising from a fire deep in a coulee\u2019s rift, I mourned, \u201cHow am I not pregnant?\u201d B shrugged: \u201cYou fell off the fertility cliff.\u201d<\/p>\n Why weep? We had three children, running ahead, fingertips in the winter-yellow wisps. Why weep, with the river cutting silver beneath the tan and pink, gray and black striae, the sky blue-blue in that bad land?<\/p>\n \u201cBad\u201d as in, \u201cno use to men.\u201d Stock starved and froze on the slopes the winter of 1886-87, unmaking ranchers\u2019 fortunes. Teddy Roosevelt and the Marquis de Mor\u00e8s fled east to their families\u2019 mansions, but the land remained, changing but unchanged by them. So my body seemed: unyielding to my desires\u2014rock against wind.<\/p>\n Weeks later, even with a positive test at last, I understood I\u2019d only delayed what\u2019s certain: once the baby came, I\u2019d never be pregnant again. I looked at that trip\u2019s photographs, searching for signs of my then-undetected pregnancy\u2014but only saw how lines curved from my lips to my chin, like gray zigs down the sides of an otherworldly canyon: my face aging to alien.<\/p>\n Still: I hadn\u2019t \u201cfallen,\u201d would be no more \u201cbarren\u201d than that country of juniper and bison, mule deer, rattlesnakes, prairie roses, prickly pear, pasqueflowers, feral horses, coyotes, wild plums, and milkvetch. Like that landscape\u2014\u201cles mauvaises terres \u00e0 traverser, bad to cross.\u201d Like Ripley. I could wield my body as a weapon of resistance.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n My body resists, but not always at my behest. It refused pregnancy. Then, it fought Teddy\u2019s gestation with nausea, heartburn, and exhaustion, segueing to lower back pain, insomnia, and Braxton Hicks so sharp I paused during walks to lean against fences. Teddy\u2019s head came to rest on my cervix the last two months, so pain shot upward each time I stood: \u201clightning crotch,\u201d my midwife called the condition.<\/p>\n Classified, during my third pregnancy at age thirty-five, as \u201cborderline geriatric,\u201d I was categorized, at forty-one and gravid, as \u201cof advanced maternal age.\u201d I went to a central office for exams; Maternal Fetal Specialists provided cutting-edge ultrasounds, genetic testing, and consultation. Though the results placed us in the pink, the counselor, nurses, and OB-GYN repeatedly mentioned the risk of genetic mutations and my odds of developing gestational diabetes or preeclampsia. They suggested\u2014at twenty weeks\u2014I schedule an induction for thirty-eight.<\/p>\n After a later visit, a nurse called because the doctor forgot to mention our son\u2019s \u201cpyelectasis\u201d at an ultrasound appointment: a two-millimeter swelling of his kidneys, which might mean he needed to urinate at the time of measurement, or that he had Down Syndrome. Another ultrasound with the OB-GYN showed the pyelectasis had \u201cresolved,\u201d but the baby measured as big. \u201cShoulder dystocia,\u201d the OB-GYN warned, meaning my son\u2019s shoulders could wedge in my pelvis.<\/p>\n Their fears became mine. Said the voice in my head: \u201cAre you sure your son\u2019s fine? Should you be pregnant? Greedy, wanting one more baby. You don\u2019t belong in the tribe of pregnant women.\u201d My inner voice contradicted the statistics, a dozen tests, and my history of healthy deliveries with \u201cThe doctor said\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n 7.<\/p>\n \u201cTeddy looks like an alien,\u201d Elle observed, echoing my mother. B sighed, \u201cI don\u2019t recognize our life. You don\u2019t talk to me. You don\u2019t come to bed.\u201d But I studied the pink shell of my baby\u2019s ear as Teddy nursed, then slept against my breast: perfect, and I made him.<\/p>\n My last infant had left the world of my womb, though, traveling the first distance of a journey that goes in one direction: away. I will grow alien.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know my body absent a child after months of blood communion, his every movement bound and protected by my muscle and skin. How long will I be haunted by the reach of a diminutive limb inside the emptiness of my abdomen? How long will I yearn for a body within my body, the possibility of creation? What will I forget of my potency and the intoxication of staring at a creature untouched by any other, wholly of my conception? Like the pain, that fleeting span, and its attendant realizations, becomes words, impressions.<\/p>\n The Aztecs believed blood sacrifice preserved the Sun and staved off Earth\u2019s destruction, so Ripley\u2019s battle with a demonic alien in a mazy ship would seem less fiction than science to them. Yet, they recognized what we choose to ignore: \u00a0a woman\u2019s power of creation. Their Divine Woman died wresting her child toward existence. Buried under watch to prevent the severing of powerful relics\u2014her hair, the middle finger from her left hand\u2014she rose and flew west, to the Place of Women. Standing at noon with sister demons, she accepted the sun from the morning guard of war-dead and walked it to the horizon. Priests knelt before her chiseled image.<\/p>\n Ripley birthed a daughter, whom she left when she took the Nostromo job, promising to return. But, after fifty-seven years drifting in stasis on an escape pod following the first movie, she wakes to find her child dead, motivating her adoption of Newt in the sequel, Aliens<\/em>. The studio cut the scenes relaying this information from the theatrical release, deeming Ripley\u2019s motherhood irrelevant and tedious. What, though, could be more provocative than a mother, teeth bared, grunting, crouched at death\u2019s edge, fingers cricked like talons to snatch souls from oblivion?<\/p>\n O\u2019Bannon gave his screenplay the working title Star Beast<\/em> but renamed the project after noting his frequent use of \u201calien\u201d in the script. He liked the ambiguity introduced by the word\u2019s dual purposes: noun, or adjective? As in: though alien pain brought infants from my alien body, I am no alien.<\/p>\n Teddy\u2019s begun to flirt, flashing gummy, dimpled grins. He seems glad I made him. I\u2019m glad I made him. Sometimes, that\u2019s enough to silence the alien voices in my head: my mom\u2019s, the soccer moms\u2019, Jenji Kohan\u2019s, even the light screaming off Ripley\u2019s ripped abdomen. \u201cBow,\u201d I imagine telling them. \u201cBow before my drooping stomach and pendent tits\u2014proof I went to the precipice, grappled children into existence, and lived.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n 1. Kane\u2019s death horrifies: pinned to a table, riven mid-scream, he births the Alien\u2019s infant. Pregnant for the first time when I first watched that scene, I noted the room\u2019s white-padded sterility and fluorescent lighting, so like the labor and delivery wing I\u2019d toured recently. But bipedal vagina dentatae impregnating men? I rolled my eyes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2331,"featured_media":19785,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wordpress-0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2026\/06\/15222150\/Queeney_A_VERSE_2026-1_Page_10.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-59h","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2331"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19795"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19827,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19795\/revisions\/19827"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}anemone beaulier<\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"