The Coal Life: Poems

Toilet Flowers

Toilet Flowers Egyptian women tied papyrus fibers into Isis knots, damming the moon blood, the open wound from Thoth, and farther east, girls watched their mothers wrapping theirs out of the same thin paper from which they folded swans, and later, a man designed the “catamenial [monthly] device,” and a man called it tampion—a plug for a cannon, keeping out dust and moisture. My high school girlfriend called it George; she’d say, “George is in town this week” when I walked my fingers up her thigh. But at ten, I knew none of this. They sat in an open box next to the toilet I shared with my three brothers, father, and mother. They didn’t come with Mother’s warnings or reprimands like “Don’t swordfight with the plunger; _____ will kill you; _____ will make you go blind.” I knew they were for her; all else was a mystery. So one Sunday morning while my family still slept, I latched the bathroom door, peeled back the wrapper as if it were a popsicle, and held the plunger: a cannon, a gun barrel. I pulled on the string, holding the pledget like a mouse by its tail. I smelled it, pressed my thumbnail into its soft density, placed it on the sconce like a candle. Pretending to light it, I threw it into the tub like an M-80, imagined Gabriel or Michael lighting the fuse with the red punk of their pupils 19 then tossing the pure white scourge at Satan. I opened another, then three, four, more and more, holding them in the corner of my mouth while squinting one eye like my father chewing his cigar, tucking them like grenades into the waistband of my skivvies. One fell into the toilet and slowly opened like a moonflower, burgeoning to life the way I imagined the sea monkeys in ads on the back cover of my comics would. I dropped all of them in, one by one, watching as they bloomed in the bowl. My mother’s footsteps, her voice behind the door—and I flushed them. The water rose, spilling over the porcelain lip. And when I faced my mother—the bathroom now flooded—I felt shame for her secret I thought I now knew, for the beauty I had created and the sin of creating it. Adamah, Adam, me, bloody loam. 20 ...