Jane Doe #21532323
lies naked on the table before us. Her eyes are closed,
the coroner explains,
because they will always be the exact shade
of someone we know.
A white sheet is draped demurely
across her pelvic bones,
but her breasts are exposed, livid in the cold steel air.
The girl next to me offers kiwi-cherry lip gloss
to smear under my nose.
This, forever, is the smell of medical school:
death and chemicals
and tropical fruit.
When the coroner incises the sternum and
breaks her ribs to show us her heart
I remember cutting up meat on a stainless steel tray;
a tasteless and unforgettable association.
We get in line to fumble through
organ and tissue and blood to
see what went wrong.
The boy beside me
lingers too long in the thoracic cavity,
prodding muscle and membrane and bone
for something uncharted, some glittering thing
that has no representation in Becker's Human Anatomy, Vol. 1.
His eyes are like a black bruise, too dark and
too tender. Needlessly, he averts his eyes when the coroner
strips the sheet from her waist. Already
he forgets she is beyond shame.
Watching him touch her cold hand
in comfort, unobtrusively, I wonder
why any of us are really here.
(physician heal thyself)
The others shuffle, impatient
for their turn to label aorta and myofascia and pericardium,
but the boy hesitates with the point of his scalpel resting
on her right atrium, unwilling
to commit her to ashes in his mind until
he finds some evidence that we are more
than the sum of our formaldehyde soaked parts.
