I woke up once to the sight of vomit
pouring like an upside down fountain
from a camper on the top bunk
down to the floor where it blossomed
into a stunning mess, ten feet across,
almost perfectly round.
Nothing about it was beautiful.
I was the counselor so I had to clean it up.
I half-heaved a thousand times at least.
Imagine waking up to vomit every day.
Imagine the thing that makes you gag the fastest.
Someone else’s vomit? Someone saying vomit?
One time when I was swimming laps I saw
a giant loogie floating below me, sinking
slowly toward the filter. It had tentacles
of slime coming off of it. It was green.
You know how we say “I just threw up
a little in my mouth” to joke that something
strikes us as horrifying or just bad news?
My son says that every day. It’s not a joke for him.
He just now choked on what he’d regurgitated.
The disease that causes his nuclear reflux
is hard to pronounce and not commonly known.
Because the pain’s inside of him some people think
it’s mostly inside his head or that he’s lying
or exaggerating or maybe just an unpleasant child.
What he has is invisible and what they can’t see
they can’t believe, apparently, but I wonder
if they could see this: maggots sliding and oozing
inside a jack-o-lantern. More maggots
inside a pus-filled cut in the arm of a woman
whose plane crashed and she wandered in the jungle
for weeks and her feet blistered and bled and cracked.
That one time in honors math class when the weird guy
popped a big stinky zit and it sprayed onto
all the really smart students next to him.
When the sad girl threw up on the bus
and it ran down the runnels of the rubber mat
and the bus driver poured the pink sawdust on it
which was supposed to soak it up but just made it worse.
I would do anything for my child.
I would write something I can barely stand to read.
I would ask people to read it and if they said no,
I would ask them if they know how lucky they are—
they can choose to avoid the thing my son can’t avoid.
marniere 