The Faceplant

By Sonia Greenfield

                 

I can go almost every day without dialing

into my animal self but there it is again:

 

the faceplant. My toddler running toward

me and his little shoe catching a tree root.

 

How his mouth hit the cement bench

with a crunch like a sledgehammer against

 

watermelon. This is the animal part: the howl

from my mouth so guttural, as if my womb

 

screamed and O, he cried too. All his baby teeth

smashed in and blood trickling from his split lip.

 

My face, though…that was a picture of terror

so instinctual it could hang in a museum among

 

the many renderings of human woe. I scooped all

fifty pounds of him and ran to my car, superpowered

 

by anguish and adrenaline. The plastic surgeon

stitched him with sutures fine as eyelashes, bent his

 

teeth back into place where they stayed until

the tooth fairy came. Two days after the ER,

 

I sneezed and fell to the floor as if birthing broken

glass from my spine. Amazing the many ways we can

 

manifest pain, I thought, as I laid there unable

to move. I can go almost every day without conjuring

 

the specter of Freud who theorized the severing

of mother from son, but once upon an oedipal stage

 

I was feral and ready to sacrifice my entire self

to save my baby who now deems me annoying

 

and dubs me bruh, his snark slipping through

perfectly straight teeth.

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