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March 20, 2025

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The Insurance Representative Tells Me How Much the Baby’s Delivery Will Cost

Katie Condon

It all depends on the child’s arrival.
If it arrives in what we call The Dawning
Hours, you’ll have to ring the bell

for entrance. In this case,
the Dawning Hours Business Office
will contact you with a separate invoice

for the resources expended to release you
from the infected world
into the lobby where you will check in

with reception. If you arrive outside
of The Dawning Hours, you will enter
through the ground floor of the North Tower.

You will find your own way.
If you reach the Medi-Spa for Patrons
Near Death, you have gone too far

in one direction. If you reach the Sensory
Deprivation Tanks for Life Resistant Arrivals™
you’ve gone too far in the other.

If your convulsions are so powerful
that you cannot walk, you can
expect a bill

for anywhere between $50 and $12,000,
depending on whether your small sea breaks
in transit and stains the carpeting.

And Ma’am? If you don’t mind me
saying so, you and your offspring
are going to want to avoid any

version of a significant rupture
—a hemorrhage, a cord
prolapse, that kind of

thing—because while your
assigned medical professional is
in network there’s no telling

whether the Life-Saving Machinery™
is in network and by “no telling”
I mean they literally will not tell you

until you get your bill, assuming
you live, otherwise your bill
will go to your next

of kin, assuming your kin lives
beyond the birth, and, what’s that,
Ma’am? No. No, I don’t know

whether your plan covers Hereafter
Care. Do you have an advanced
directive? I see. Yes, certainly, yes,

I’ll transfer you Higher Up.

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about this poem

“Preparing to give birth was, for me, as nearly a dystopian experience as the birth itself. During my first pregnancy, I’d often wonder if the healthcare system was designed with the intention to confuse people until they stopped asking questions. How naive of me. This poem aims to simulate the absurd experience of advocating for care coverage, only to be met over and over again with the farcically inhumane attitudes of the systems that claim to support our health.”
—Katie Condon

Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked (Ohio State University Press, 2020), which won the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize. A former Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University and a recipient of the 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Condon is an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University and lives in Dallas.

Praying Naked
(Ohio State University Press, 2020)

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related poems

“Patients” by Aurora Levins Morales

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“Oregon State Hospital” by Roberto Cabrera

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Thanks to Kim Addonizio, author of Exit Opera (W. W. Norton, 2024), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about Addonizio’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.

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“The Insurance Representative Tells Me How Much the Baby’s Delivery Will Cost” by Katie Condon

March 20, 2025

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The Insurance Representative Tells Me How Much the Baby’s Delivery Will Cost

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