The body politic as a metaphor by which the State, society, or Church is conceived of as a human body, has been used continuously in the West, but it has been deployed selectively. As early as the sixth century BCE the poet Theognis and the statesman Solonis referred to cities as “pregnant” or “wounded.” Women, and mothers, of course, have only recently been considered members of the body politic, or civic citizens in their own right, in the last hundred years in which women have had the right to vote, to own credit cards and property, to exercise reproductive choices; thus, it would seem that women’s (and mother’s) bodies are historically abstract in literary (and national) narratives. This paper will explore recent strategies of embodiment in American motherhood poetry, which fuse the personal, the civic, focusing on Rachel Zucker, Sarah Vap, and Adrienne Rich.