Post-Mortem
Beneath the third rib, a memory.
I look at it with my surgeon’s loupe, smear
a slide, inspect it under my third eye.
Diseased.
Was this the cause of death?
A living room. A man and a woman,
so close I spy the five o’clock shadow loitering
his pores, her greedy lash hoarding a tear.
I’ve never told anyone I have these powers,
what the slice of a liver may reveal.
Memories travel if
unwanted — your drunk mother in this liver,
your incestuous father in that common bile duct.
I’ve never wanted my own body, never valued it.
To cut is proper, to forget, divine.
Mittens stippled with snow. Runners of a sled.
Tracks of a child’s destiny.
One aorta carries a memory all the way to my toes.
I walk on my father’s shattered looking glass.
I was not prepared for the blessing, the gratitude to
my scalpel, to living in blood no longer circulating.
For years I’ve imagined I might find her
in some dead stranger’s heart, the lost child,
her injury a swimmy thing, her sorrow slipping away
through the superior mesenteric, on through arterial arcades,
into diverticula, pockets where she hid,
places she didn’t know can teem with disease.
I need the dead, their accidents, their cruel passings.
What will I find in this liver?
What’s stored in its cells?
Is this what killed her?
Cause of death: unknown.
There was an orange sofa (or was it, too, red?),
stains of my mother, her spicy cheek, Saturday lip.
There was a man who came bearing gifts.
A bottle. A Barbie.
Cause of happiness: unknown.
The summer he partook of me the crickets went crazy.
They rubbed their wings right off. After, I cut Barbie open
with infected hands, broke into her plastic perfection
to find nothing inside.
Bodies on my slab, too injured to have their organs harvested.
Dead under suspicious circumstances.
Flesh to pry, memories to dissect.
Gunshot wounds.
Hit and runs.
Stabbings.
Poisonings.
Asphyxiations.
Sometimes they are taken apart before they come to me,
and then,
to find what I am looking for,
I may only have only a leg,
a torso.
Sometimes, less. Sometimes,
scarcely
a
hand.