Two Poems
Biology Class
The circulatory system of the rat was too small,
arteries thready and ruinable by study, so they
shipped us bullfrogs. These ones three times
the size of the rats, their Louisiana hearts big enough,
their veins and valve connections more visible.
On each frog’s belly, cuts had been made
that opened its torso like a book, front cover
and back, and its story was all there on one deep page.
We read it from beginning to end, the blood chapter,
anyway (though all their blood had been poured out
to keep the lab clean and dissectors’ hands unstained).
In the lab’s remaining minutes we could read
whatever else of the frog we wanted, so we read
the food chapter, our scalpels tracing slits
across our beastie’s tightly packed stomach,
and there (book within a book!) curled a crayfish
bigger than a big man’s thumb, its many legs
and eyes on stalks perfectly preserved as well,
swallowed but not a jot digested.
Poor bullfrog (or not, his last moments spent
snagging and slurping down this fine crustacean
filet), guts up on the lab bench, his elegantly curved
chin a dead, shiny grey in the flat classroom light.
What would we, the dissectors, divulge
from our dark body cavities if you got us pinned
to that waxen slab? What would you find
stuffed in our nineteen-year-old guts?
The last things we took in before they got us,
I imagine: swollen, overworked hearts, fresh
as the night we snapped them shut inside us;
arms and legs that held us close; spines of jelly;
larynxes choked with the unsaid and the unrepeatable.
What crazy school let us (eyes staring, tongues
dry and graceless, lips bruised with backroom kissing,
brains red and puddle in our anxious pants)
peek into the books of the soft and harmless
with handfuls of small sharp objects?
Vanity
I check my lipstick on the train.
Powder my nose in the compact
mirror. Try not to look too closely
at my wrinkly eyes. Wonder how long
it’ll be before I start missing the lips
with the lipstick just enough
to look pathetic; unhinged.
There’s a horror in me of becoming
the lady I see on the train platform.
From behind she’s a club bunny:
ribbon-thin, wearing five-inch heels,
spandex, cropped white fur jacket,
her hair overdyed but still a full,
long platinum. She’s everything
tight and bright, lifted and lit up.
Then she turns and I see her face.
She’s at least seventy.
Make-up sits on her skin like bits
of a broken shield, all its heraldry
splintered and scattered in primary
colours across her face. She’s a shock,
a sore, a desperate swipe at time that’s left
her lacerated, decorated self balancing there,
a deep-fried, brightly blasted bit of bone.
