Cut

Want to watch me cut up a chicken? my mother asks.A daughter’s lesson: to cut or take apart,to slip a kitchen knife between muscle and ball joint.

Stoics split the soul, stored its fractionsin the chambers of the heart. Use a sharp knife,she said. The dull blade, more treacherous, slips.

A woman learns how easily flesh parts,the pressure needed to pop a joint, to sever gristle.Use salt water to soak the meat. Blood ruins, taints.

Well-schooled, I trim the seams of fat, flingthe offal into its sack. Let the flies come.Let them transcribe it all anew.

          Cut             reduced    toparts             quarter ed

processed: My father lies nakedon a steel gurney, his ribs pried open. The cargo takenfrom his stomach. His heart—its black chamberscaulked and sealed with fat, black ballast, blackstone—is chopped free, held in a rubber glove,and weighed. Skin

is the body’s largest organ. My father’s skinwas brown and mottled with mole. Split open—his body waits for the official report. A gloved handrepacks and staples the chest’s cavity, records, signs,and stamps complete. I hold what remains. Woman’s work—the art of cutting and cutting away—to part and part from.