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.