It must have felt good in her mouth
rolling it around with her toddler’s tongue
the way it fit between her gums and cheek
click-clacking against her milk teeth
You must remember it then
the way the world sloshed about with bravura,
the salivating primordial slop of youth
I don’t think we were innocent of the process even then
just a different kind of magnanimous ignorant
Then, instinctively, incidentally,
she swallowed
The sky glowed stygian-red,
sun a flashlight pressed against a finger
the ridges of her fingerprints, her capillaries
pulsing illuminated orange
Thus flowed digestion, amortization,
contango and peristalsis
all of us accessory organs to
the biology of the machine
We were stripped
of our varnish, weren’t we?
Scrubbed raw by the
demands of the mucosal market
every surface of porous pink
maximized for our absorption
Molecules shredded, bonds broken
to rebuild the order
amino acid chain reactions
to line the pockets of men
Did we ever excavate her jejunum for answers?
Was this the divine design,
for this foreign forged pearl
lodged inside her?
Why did she unscrew that
knob in the first place?
Did it tumble into her hand,
the weight of it in her baby-soft palm pleasing?
Was there a reason she
swallowed it,
like Cronus his children?
Is there ever?
