dissections

Mary Jordan

The bitter odor of formaldehyde takes me down

and the rubbing alcohol-sharpness sobers me up

Waning between the pendulum swaying of my gut

and some sort of aching, tentative fascination

When my gloved fingers gently graze

over the snout’s vibrissae, its soft pale whiskers

I think of the delicate peach fuzz on your cheeks

and I feel something inside of me split open.

I take notes, bloodless viscera soaking into paper

dappled across single-spaced blue calibri lines

of what I ought to see in this wasted little life

each feature and its rightful, expected place

I don’t note its pallid skin, cold, slick and stiff

like after thorns of the slow freeze have dug into my skin

bringing the sprawling red of capillaries contracting

clawing frosty numbness and runny noses

Frigid winter winds against the shells of my ears

Will you warm them with your tender palms?

As my breath escapes in little plumes of frozen mist

like great white billows from the fume hoods below

The never-rotting dead animal of my body lies

in the early morning, sleepless yet not awake

stale light and steady cold creeps through the gaps

of the window’s white mortar frame at my feet

and when I stand in the sterile fluorescent light

of the carpet-linoleum hallway going nowhere

I tell myself that our dissections were worthwhile

our biohazard loving safely measured and disposed

yet all the little shivers of mine can’t chase out

the chill that’s already seeped within my bones,

buried deep in the marrow where it all began,

where this borrowed scalpel won’t cut through.