A Taste of My Own Medicine

This poem explains its own context.

    A Taste of My Own Medicine

I’m taking my morning pills when I start
to cough, and the water threatens to climb
my throat and come out my nose – as if
it were a laughing teenager’s Coke –
but I manage to hold it back and taste
instead that acrid snort you get when
you gasp for air before you’ve surfaced,
and, for a moment, I’m back in the pool
at the Wilmington Y, where I learned to
swim, naked as a babe (who they say will
act like fish instinctively if you have the
heart to dump them in the water.) Back then
swimsuits were forbidden us Young Christians,
as if we were all innocent Adams that summer
before the fall. I was a Tadpole, aspiring
to be a Minnow – mostly older boys with hints
of hair under their arms and between their
legs. One of them offered me some candy
in the locker room and laughed when I discovered
it was a Dog Yummy. And now, as I gag
on a half-dissolved lozenge, I wonder
if that jokester was the snake in my Eden
or just one of the me’s I did not come to be.