after hiding a half-emptied bottle of popov in my sock drawer and
blacking out
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At 3:31 AM the strange noise of my vomiting
woke my mother who rushed into my room and found me lying face-up, alone, choking on my own yellow bile. She turned my fifteen-year-old body over and slapped me on my back as if she were burping a baby. She tried not to think it, but it was easy enough to see: maybe I would not recover. Ignoring the taste and smell of my stomach acid, she put her mouth on mine and blew air into my lungs two breaths at a time. She pumped my chest the way a mother might pump air into her son’s first bike tires: she was calm because she had to be. And because of her calmness, I began to breathe again. Even after this, she did not settle into anger with me. Rather, she wrapped her arms around my chest and held me on my side till morning, now and then brushing the stiff, vomit-coated hairs from where they kept falling in my face. She rose as the sunlight began to bring shape back to my room. Though I was too heavy for her to lift completely, she pulled the sheets from under my weight and washed my body with a wet cloth where she could. When I finally woke from the blackness, remembering nothing of the night, I was in my bed. But she was there—my mother. She was there watching over me. It took me years to understand. |
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Christopher Watkins lives in Chicago where he is a student in DePaul University’s MFA program in writing and publishing. His poetry appears in such journals as After Hours, Blueline, and Bosque, among others.