This poem is part of the special section, New Poems of U.S. History, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence selected by editors Carolivia Herron, Summer Tate, and Robert Bettmann. You can read more about the section on the Day Eight website here.

It’s 1920 and Clara opens her eyes
to meet her daughter at the 27th week.
She hears, a few minutes…maybe hours,
and then remembers: Coney Island Pier
a sign that read: “with living infants” where the feet
of gawkers pointed to an exhibit of America’s first

incubators. Clara tries to breathe her daughter in first,
as if inhaling could push the girl’s eyes
open. She cabs to the fair, her babe’s feet
tiny as the raw, stray peanuts she saw last week
scattered like confetti on the pier.
She arrives less than two hours

later to the exhibit: a line of machines rumored to will hours
from weaklings, manned by a make-do-doctor. First,
he weighs them then risks to peer
pass these babes’ spokes of arms, their ruddy buckeyes
of heads and boney legs, however weak.
While MD’d cynics championed robust, effete

cherubs, Dr. Couney hears the unfinished stomp in little feet.
Spectators encircle the incubators for hours.
Why do we gawk, enraptured by this weak
space that divides us from our first,
unfinished selves? Do our insatiate eyes
hope to unearth happier

outcomes than our own? Days on, Clara’s girl, Elizabeth, can peer
at her own, clumsy starfish of hands, her twitching feet,
inhabited eggs. But is she actually here yet, if her eyes
confuse the sun’s glare with ours?
Who are we first—
a person seeing or a person seen? A week

on Dr. Couney continues to gradually tweak
life into Lizzy. That haterchy—peer after peer,
each babe offering a first
of something. Outside the crowd of feet
part for two people, trembling: “She’s ours!”
until their gaze meets two familiar eyes.

So, Lizzy, that’s mom and dad, appearing at your feet.
This begins the first of many hours,
many weeks wherein you’ll find yourself by looking to their eyes.

Courtney Hitson teaches undergraduate rhetoric, literature, and creative
writing. In 2025, she had worked published in Kestrel: A Journal of Art and
Literature, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and Canary: A
Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, and others. Outside of writing,
she enjoys illustrating, unicycling, and philosophy.

Featured image See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons