| InterBoard Poetry Competition | |
JACK’S BELLY BUTTON
Jenni Russell
(The Critical Poet)
Jack has this belly-button “condition.” A robin-egg blue lint grows
inside it. When I attempt to remove the lint, he becomes aggressive,
recoils defensively. He says the doctor cut his umbilical cord wrong
and there’s a hole inside his belly-button exposing his organs to
the air. He claims the lint is a byproduct of these organs’ secretions.
I never believed him. I always thought he saved the lint for his Mom,
who used it to stuff her hand-made quilts. But tonight as he stood beside
my chair, I looked inside his belly-button and saw a tiny heart beating.
“Hold still!” I told him. The tiny heart flashed and rotated like a police
light. Above it a pair of pink fuzzy handcuffs dangled from a lava
lamp. I pressed my eye to Jack’s belly-button and saw a room filled
with confetti, plastic fruit in wooden bowls, dried sea sponges, trip wire,
lobsters with rubber bands wrapped around their pinchers stacking
themselves like plates inside a dishwasher, and at a cluttered desk with
old chewing gum stuck to its side, a gnome swiveled in a leather chair
smacking gum, blowing it, and popping huge robin-egg blue bubbles.
About the InterBoard Poetry Competition
Archive of IBPC Winners
First Honorable Mention, August 2005
