The Douala's Forehead

Labial and so forth: the sky, the great hawking maw of the word, Majorca and Minorca, a rekindling of what lies inside with what lies outside, the cistern-belly stretched to five centimeters. He lay in the curd of her belly, biscuits and whey-marrow, his mother cutting the crusts from the edges of his toast. She spread oleo and turnip-paste on his breakfast cakes, saying it would bring out the vim and vigor that lay stultified in the kip of his belly. A stringy spat-cord, what tethers her belly to the bubo of his navel. His mother ate pan-fried cake and lard-biscuits, anything that required steaming and precooking. She carried low, her uterus strained to tipple. She grunted and moaned; eyes fixated on the Douala’s forehead, olive green bled into the copper of her hands. ‘Stop it, she demanded, ‘this is most annoying!’ She carried low, the turret of her pelvis pressed against the railing of the bed, collard and kale and some smell she couldn’t identify. ‘Such a shameless hussy’ she moaned, ‘and me with my legs in tethers, suckling collards from the marrow of me piggly-wigglies’. He corseted up the down, his grandmamma’s stern warning ever-present in his thoughts, ‘there’ll be hell to pay, my boy…more than a soul can cash and carry’.