Moving

[stephywang]

As a child, my mouth and head
felt like the desert.
I ignored it as best I could
until one day I was unable to stand it
and told my mother.
This news disturbed her.
At the doctor’s I was
dismissed
as a case of hypochondria.
Years passed
until I became an hourglass
but still felt an aridness that
I could not weather.
I went to the doctor
again.
Inspecting the inside of my mouth he
found a white feather of bandage
(where it came from I do not know).
“Must be from a previous surgery,” he said
and began tugging it out.
A river of cotton flowing from my mouth
turned my doctor’s delicacy into alarm
that he began tugging,
handafterhandafterhand
the skein from me
like the never-ending scarves
escaping from a magician’s lips.
With whiteness snaked around me,
I marveled whether
at the end of this magic trick,
a dove would emerge from my lips and
fly away.
A final cough sent the last
threads from my viscera
and I was declared
no longer stuffed.
Someplace faraway,
I open the mouth of the bottle
and set free the cotton inside.