The Odoriferous, Visionary Life Of Carol Love Poem by Ron Stock

Piggy Wiggy! Piggy Wiggy! That's how the boys used to taunt her. Poor girl. To their 8-year-old eyes she was the ugliest thing on planet earth. Short and wide, but that is not what set Carol Love apart. It was her face, cadmium red and round as a plate. Ears, thin pink potato chips. Nose, upturned, flat, with exposed nostrils. Mouth, as cadmium as her face. Hair, brown and wispy. Eyeglasses; a shame, big, heavy, black an' gray, sometimes sliding down her nose, but when not, those deep blue eyes magnified a thousand times.
The boys were all perfect, of course, simply because they were white boys in America. Apart from their teacher, Miss Pew, these boys were in control, and they never, let up, on Carol Love. Nor did the girls. So Carol felt left out and wanted to do something special so the kids would love her, or at least like her. On her birthday, Carol brought in Baby Ruth candy bars. 'Wow, candy in the middle of the day, ' the children thought, 'Carol can't be all that bad.' Poor Carol wasn't all that bad, but her candy was, filled with crawling white worms. Carol broke down in tears, ran from the building and hid behind a large oak tree in the far west corner of the playground. It took sooooome coaxing from Miss Pew before Carol Love would return to the classroom and continue her arithmetic studies.
This old, white clapboard country schoolhouse with a single bell tower had a blue front door facing south, and 3 tall, narrow windows on walls east and west. Just inside the door on the left, opposite a vestibule for hanging coats and hats, was an indoor pit toilet.
One extremely sweaty day, when Miss Pew, tall, lithe, blond, with soft green eyes, was standing in front of the blackboard, Carol Love asked if she could be excused to go to the bathroom. "Yes, " answered Miss Pew. So Carol wiggled out of her seat, waddled to the vestibule, then closed and locked the pit toilet door behind her. Next, she lowered her pants, sat, pooped, wiped, pulled up her pants. But like you and I, Carol couldn't resist taking a peek at her poop. She leaned over the saw cut hole in the worn wooden seat and looked down. And because it was a hot, sweaty day, Carol's big, heavy, black and gray eyeglasses slipped off the bridge of her nose and landed on top of the pile of human feces 6 feet below. The pile of caca was crawling with little white maggots. When Carol heard the splat, she thought, 'Oh no! Ooohh, ' then turned to the one person she knew, loved her.
She stepped into the vestibule and raised her hand. "Yes Carol? " asked Miss Pew. At that, every kid turned around to see Carol Love without her eyeglasses, and to their amazement, she was cute, in a big, red, piggy-bear sort of way. Cuddly, even charming.
Carol waved for Miss Pew to come to her aid. After the two entered the pit toilet, the class heard Miss Pew exclaim, "Oh gosh, what shall we do? " That certainly peeked the interest of the class, so when Miss Pew and Carol walked out and closed the front door, the students raced to the playground side windows to see what was going on. They heard the iron clean-out door creak open and close, then watched as Miss Pew, carrying a cloth bundle, scurried over to the hand-crank well, pumped three times, and washed Carol's eyeglasses under the water spigot. It didn't matter, for the rest of the day, all the children could see, when they looked at Carol face and eyeglasses was, well, you can imagine.