Immaculate

Mine was a virgin birth.

After my sister came,
the doctors sewed my mother up from the outside
then turned her inside out,
like a pillow,
and stuffed her with rosemary and marigolds,
sealing her shut.

When, eight years later,
I crawled out of my mother's mouth,
an immaculate emesis,
it was no wonder I wasn't formed like normal children,
neither fearfully nor wonderfully,
but monstrously,
and smelling of rotting flower petals.

The first man my eyes ever saw was a doctor
a harmer
a healer
an expert
a fixer.
He took me in his arms and clucked like an old lady gossiping after church.
Poor thing, poor creature,
he seemed to say.
Malformed, he scribbled in my file
along with a treatment plan
a roadmap to normal.

But my body had fought its way into existence
like crashing a party.
I swung in on a chandelier and parkoured my way to the dancefloor
before anyone could check the guest list.
And the tribe of women that raised me,
can't you see them?
There they are,
at the bottom of the spiral stairs in quinceañera gowns,
widening their circle to let me in,
wild-eyed and panting,
pretending to know the moves.

They slow themselves down,
hiking up their skirts so I can see their feet at work.
When I stumble, they say nothing,
only continue deliberately, methodically
until I catch up.

But I never catch up, try as I might.

There was a time when I vomited regularly
involuntarily
sometimes heaving so hard
I would pop a blood vessel in my eye
or scratch up my esophagus so badly
I could hardly breathe.

My mother took me to the gastroenterologist
but of course he could find nothing wrong.
A child of vomit
is born to vomit.
And although my mother made me,
I was a thing distinct and inscrutable.

Imagine collecting all of your bodily emissions,
all of your urines and snots and discharges,
inspecting them to arrive at some truth about yourself.
This is the distance between parent and child.

We are all of us refuse of the universe
scrambling around to pick up our scraps
digesting ourselves to life.
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