Douche-Bag Ode by Sharon Olds

Douche-Bag Ode

When I hear the young refer to someone as a

douche bag, I want to say, You may have

never seen a douche bag. They were red

rubber bags, like hot water bottles, you’d

fill it and hang it high enough

so that gravity . . . I can’t go on,

I see my mother’s douche bag, my poor

douche-bag mom’s pathetic douche bag with its

clamps, and its aorta tubes,

dangling over the bathtub, awesomely

shameful, and which reminded me I

’d been some kind of catsup Halloween

costume in her, almost before I was

bipedal. And so to call someone a

saline sac—Let’s take some pity

on the creepiness of how women were treated

in the 1950s. It drove my mother

crazy, but she did the best she could—

she never turned and said, I could have got

rid of you, my little valentine,

but I gave you the warm, rose-colored lunch bag

of the placenta: I gave you my heart to eat.

And now I remember it, not my mother’s

but mine, like a dowry—lock the door, then,

hang it from the shower rod like food hung over

a bough, out of animal reach,

slide the perforated wand inside you then un-

clasp the clamp, and Lo!, you are

a night clearing, in which a fountain o

f Aphrodite leaps up, her brine

sea chanty, her sparkling douche-bag song.