POEM | FREE VERSE | MEMORIES

Souvenirs

From childhood and motherhood

The doctor slit my skin, twice releasing my best catches. The cut line carries my belly like a hobo’s bindle.

But my hobo’s a hoarder, packing prodigal pounds.

My scar has a sheen. Stretch the skin and you will see light pink, or is it salmon?

Like the fish I caught with my father as a kid. We woke early, boating on Lake Washington’s black water before sunrise. Dad showed me how to make his drinks —

ice, three fingers of whiskey, fill with Coke, never Pepsi.

Fishing at the Potholes Reservoir, I dug through dirt in the worm bucket, skewered the wiggling bait, grabbed handfuls of ice from the cooler.

Dad still remembers those drinks, an inch of silt in the bottom of the glass, a murky river, still better than fucking up a perfectly good drink with New Coke, he’d say for decades.

I learned to cuss and clean fish — chop off the head and tail, slice the belly, rip the guts out.

I scraped their slimy bodies with dad’s old pocket knife, rinsed the scales off with the garden hose, staining the grass iridescent, squeezed their guts like kneading a bowl of Jell-O.

That’s how it felt when my doctor cut me open to reel in my sons, twisting and pressing on my guts, like he’s wringing out a wet rag, stacking them on my belly, before squishing them back like he’s zipping a packed suitcase.

They kept my stones after removing my gallbladder. No souvenirs, just new scars, a bill, and a glossy photo of my guillotined organ marinating in blood,

its belly sliced up the middle, exposing the rocky riverbed, a slate-gray egg sac.

If I could gut the bindle like a fish, filet it flat, I’d save the Cesarean scar, a trophy fish < THIS BIG >