wide-eyed hairball breathing

This post was recently written during a St. Marks Poetry Project workshop. "Wide-eyed hairball breathing" is a phrase inspired by a writer's block exercise, courtesy of my vivacious and inspirational instructor, Sharon Mesmer.

She was in labor for 26 and a half hours, all the while cursing the gods for answering her previous pleas of child bearing. "Fuuuck! You!" That was directed at her husband. They had become wildly attracted to one another over chilled shrimp cocktail and winecoolers, conceived, and three weeks later got hitched in Vegas. Now she wanted him castrated.

The room shook under her shrieks and roars and finally the child was yanked from her pulsating uterus, a soaring champagne cork fizzing by. Everyone stared with deep inhalations.

He said nothing at first. Can you believe that? He put that woman through nine months of nausea, gas, and bloating, and then when she brings him into a glorious and brand new world of stretching and breast feeding and coddling, he hasn't a single thing to say. Typical. He just lay there, bloody and helpless under layers of thick mucus, a wide-eyed hairball breathing. Only breathing.

Then the doctor, with his cotton vent strapped behind the ears, picked the child up by his dimpled ankles, head dangling, and whacked him good. But that doctor didn't know what he was doing. That doctor had unwittingly granted Thaddeus Emerson Yorke III eternal permission to never shut up.