Anatomy as Art

Instead of consuming children,

as Goya would have it,

we are preying on the carcasses

of the elderly.

I am ashamed of the damage and disfigurement

that I have done, my hands

bound to the scalpel.

I confess.

My cadaver (you break it, you buy it of course)

has been skinned, his muscles

divided into easily distinguishable layers,

eyes cut out, head chopped not so neatly in half,

tongue frozen in midair like

two caterpillars victim to a child

with a can of starch.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

is an anatomy lab on the 7th floor of a brick building

in the middle of the west.

In the beginning, we were born into this profession

by putting on new scrubs and unskillfully dissecting the superficial back.

As we cut deeper, we indulged ourselves

in liver and kidney, anything vital we would uncover from

its fascia.  In the final stages we chopped and tore.  With my gloved hands

I ripped out a strip of sacrum.

In the final panel of the triptych,

old people who can’t afford a proper burial

are desecrated for the sin of poverty.

We, the youth, pierce human flesh

with a pair of surgical scissors and

an obscured dream.