Placenta

By Alexei Moon Casselle 1/31/06


Born of earth and seeded soil
Return my flesh into the ground
From whence I was created

On a grey September afternoon, 12:03 to be exact, out came a confused 1980 from my mother’s womb. Inside an apartment on First Avenue, my mother expelled me from her belly with the aid of midwives. My useless and frantic father repeating, “I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to cause you this pain,” tears in his eyes, my mother responding
“Would you shut-up! You’re not helping me!” amidst the gathering of curious neighbor friends and some of their children. Blankets were wrapped around the shivering me and I was cleaned of fetal membranes and amniotic fluids, silent and sudden.
My mother, being of the holistic and Eastern medicine philosophy (hence the at-home delivery), decided that she was going to bury my, or, her, no, our placenta into the ground, to which it came. The Minnesota winds, however, were hard that year and the ground was already far too hard to dig up and frost looked into our windows. Mom decided to do what anybody faced with the dilemma of burying a placenta in impenetrable soil would do: she put it in a plastic baggie and stored it in a freezer until the ground was soft again.

Born of earth and seeded soil
Return my flesh into the ground
From whence I was created

Winter passed through Minneapolis and the vegetation unfolded slowly under the pale sun. The birds sang and shook the branches they jumped to and from, the neighborhood dogs sniffed each other in parks and a warm breeze rolled the empty bottles down the gutter sounding like whiskey wind chimes. It was placenta time.
The opaque freezer bag was removed and placed on a windowsill like some twisted version of mama’s home cooked blueberry pie, to thaw in the sun. A spot was picked; a hole was dug. When my mother returned for the afterbirth, it was no longer there. A quick investigation lead to the neighbor’s dog Sophie. Sophie was 50% German shepherd, 50% wolf and 100% gnawing on my placenta.
Sophie made it clear that we could fight her for the meat-patty, but one way or another she was going to have meat in her teeth. After a quick standoff, all attempts to retrieve the amniotic sack were aborted and Sophie trotted off into the sunset to finish her treat.

Born of earth and seeded soil
Return my flesh into the ground
The ground from whence it came