Silver staples and black thread, a neat railroad
track across the bottom of her mother’s stomach,
clickety clack, clickety clack. Kristin at four
is fascinated with sutures. She imagines
the staple gun, sees the needle’s red-dot
insertions, the thread untrimmed, a loop
and coarse knot at the end of the moon.
We are frog-squatting on the bathroom floor,
the baby asleep, my sister’s breasts
no longer aching. She’s lying back
on a spongy bathroom mat, triple layers
of clean towels, a pillow under her neck,
her knees up to limit the stretch,
the horrible sense her gut will fall out.
Silent, her eyes closed, she trusts what we do.
We’ve lined up antiseptic cotton swabs,
Q-tips, the brown hydrogen peroxide bottle,
a roll of gauze in its Johnson & Johnson box,
the metal circle of adhesive tape clicked into
its metal circle, and Kristin’s Fisher-Price
doctor kit with stethoscope, tongue
depressor, knee knocker—useless, she already
knows, ready to hand me another Q-tip
she’s dipped in the bottle. The wound oozes
pus in two places where it’s not healing,
gray-green ooze, some new yellow ooze.
It bubbles when I touch it, and this is what
I lift as I roll the Q-tip, picking up pieces
of rotting flesh, the soft scab matter
that soaks loose. There’s a bad smell.
One place in the wound is a hole or trench
where another stitch or staple was needed
or broke. I use tiny sewing scissors to cut away
a rim of flesh, so dead it doesn’t hurt at all.
Kristin watches and then from her side
of the swollen stomach, she rolls a peroxide-
saturated Q-tip over a place I can’t reach.
She’s steady and focused, careful and exact,
not forgetting: this is her mother, this is the spot
where her baby brother crawled out safe
in her world, no splotches, square shoulders,
his perfect round head. She doesn’t know
this is the beginning of her love for microbes,
benign, malignant, healing—cell lines
she will grow in square glass dishes, anything alive
or dead she can measure on film graphs, especially
what she can’t see, mysteries of the body.
An open wound, a stitch, peculiar passions,
ties tightly bound, no matter what.
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Anderson, I. Sutures. J GEN INTERN MED 25, 166 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-009-1169-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-009-1169-4