I thought of including phlegm in this book.
But phlegm is almost exactly like it sounds:
the sticky mucus that coats your throat, choking
you until you expel it with a round

of wet coughs that signals to all around
that you’ve got a cold. But phlegmatic just
means composed, apathetic, abounding
in phlegm, but not in the sickly, disgusting

sense – in the ancient sense of the four
humors, bodily elements thought to
govern a person. Phlegm was the humor
thought to cause sluggishness and calm, imbuing

the person with an evenness of temper. Still,
soothing or not, the word makes you sound ill.

* * * * *

Holly Painter is a Creative Writing MFA graduate of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her poetry has been published on four continents, and in dozens of literary journals and collections, including the New Zealand Listener, Sport, Landfall, JAAM, and the Cream City Review. Holly lives in both Ann Arbor, Michigan and Singapore and works as a copy-editor, a poet-for-hire (adoptapoet.wordpress.com), and a volunteer at 826michigan. Her submssions to Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure can be found here.

It’s mostly the way the word just drops
from your mouth, over before you even
start, and lands somewhere, like the sloppy
plunging sound of vomit as you heave

into the toilet. If that seems like an
unnecessary image for me to
plant in your head, I wonder if you can
suggest a less repulsive way to use

the word plop. Because most people think
of poo and various other semisolids and liquids you’d never drink
or even want to touch. Really, aside

from the patter of fat falling raindrops
there’s just no polite way to use plop.

* * * * *

Holly Painter is a Creative Writing MFA graduate of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her poetry has been published on four continents, and in dozens of literary journals and collections, including the New Zealand Listener, Sport, Landfall, JAAM, and the Cream City Review. Holly lives in both Ann Arbor, Michigan and Singapore and works as a copy-editor, a poet-for-hire (adoptapoet.wordpress.com), and a volunteer at 826michigan. Her submssions to Dr. Hurley’s Snake-Oil Cure can be found here.