Peristalsis
And weren’t we so relieved
when our baby passed his first
meconium, charting it, now greenish
and finally, mustard-yellow with white
seeds of a breastfed baby and one
of the side-effects of pregnancy
is constipation and the first indication
that something was wrong was diarrhea.
Everything slows down for new life.
The olfactory bulb, the sense
of smell, is something that if not used
from birth, is lost, like sight, like movement.
I was the child with the constant cold,
with little Kleenex bunnies in all of my coats.
I can’t smell and at women’s shelter,
three-year-old Matty used
poop as a crayon to mark the little toilet
area for the children. Surprising how
quickly he smeared his feces everywhere
on that gray tile and it provided a sense
of ownership and control, expressed feelings
of rage, powerlessness; None of this I knew
I just slapped some gloves on him and me
and we scrubbed it down together. He never
did that again, Something about my lack of negative
emotion, the refusal to disgust, the encouragement,
together-time, the peristalsis, microvilli doing
their best to wave the bolus on.