Ingrid Andersson

CONTACT:
Email: ingridthemidwife@gmail.com
Website: https://www.ingridandersson.info/     

BIO:
Ingrid Andersson has practiced as a home-birth nurse midwife and health care activist for over 20 years. Her poetry has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net and has appeared in Ars Medica, Eastern Iowa Review, Literary Mama, Midwest Review, Minerva Rising, Plant-Human Quarterly, Wisconsin People & Ideas and elsewhere. She lives in Madison with her husband, son, dogs, chickens and bees. For more information, please visit ingridandersson.info.

PUBLICATIONS:
Jordemoder: Poems of a Midwife, published by Holy Cow! Press, April 2022. Launch party at Room of One's Own in Madison, April 20 at 7pm.

Poetry

At the Green Burial Informational Luncheon

Would I lay my mother’s spent stem and flower body
in my bed, intimate with the marriage of love and grief?

Or would I lay her on the kitchen table (pulling out an extra
leaf) where we eat? What will I do with my mother’s body

when she is dead? I study the folds of her petal-face
looking forward in the folding chair beside me, and then

the smooth-faced funeral-sellers in front of us, who
seem nice enough, thinking us promising customers.

Her only wish, she states, is to be laid in dirt
less than four feet deep, so the hungry microbes may eat.

“Why does it have to be so complicated, so much paperwork
for the State, rules of custody, transportation—why such fuss?”

No question, I’d prefer to lay her at the foot of the black
walnut tree in my yard, where the strong-willed goldenrod,

tiger lilies and old-world lilacs bloom. I’d want to go there
evenings, recount the news, and how death’s ravages

render such feasts of color, pollen, and in spring
the most beloved perfume.