You will learn about the laughter—
the awkward, jilted escape from
the altar of emotion—
that you will see the puddle
of formaldehyde on the steel
table, then laugh.
You do not know what it is
to be seventeen but somehow,
you are. You are
a plank of wood floating down
a river. You cannot recall the
names of every
naked body you have met, but
you could count them on one
hand. Your father
is not dead, not yet, but soon.
You will enter the Human
Dissection Lab
with kitten curiosity, your
fingers running the circle
of every jarred
tumor. You will not faint
or fever. You will watch
the technician
pat the garbage bag that
covers the dead woman’s
vagina as if
he were patting a newborn
rabbit and you will be very
aware of every
hair on your arm. You are not
the pacemaker that blinked
slowly off and
killed her. You did not kill
the teenage boy, either.
Later you will
be a nylon, hashed and plastered
on the wound you have from
running then falling
then skidding your legs on
the driveway. You are a gash
brimming with
tar. You will be the sound
of ripping the nylon away
from your own
once-unblemished flesh.
Later your larynx will dust
like a ghosttown—
the technician will suggest
you are allergic to the peas
inside the packed
lunch. You are not, will never,
be allergic to peas. You will
thumb a Xanax
in your pocket, steal a scalpel
off an unattended shelf, slice
the pill into two
little canoes, later swallow
the boats while sitting inside
your parked
car, a waterfall of rubbing
alcohol on your patella, your
femur. You
are the unmapped abyss of the sea.
The technician will offer you
the dead boy’s
brain to hold, and you will cup it,
bite your lip, try not to think
of raw meat but
it feels like raw meat. Later you
will learn to expect the ghosts,
the way one
expects the mailman, the exact
time he slips invoices and
mailorder
catalogs into the slot of the door
of your home. You will
know the cue
and you will climb out of your
window. You will be locked
by a pale
blush, by this pulse. You will
find that every hallway
of every
city has a cold spot, every wall
has a chafe where the paint
slacks and thins.