The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process

The Necessary Fiction

180 C. Dale Young The Necessary Fiction coMPlAINT of The MedIcAl IlluSTRAToR Here is the incision, it will be your gateway to the afterlife. Pull back the skin slowly. The dead will tolerate only so much disturbance. The blood you believed surrounded organs and muscle is not here, is it? See the liver, it will bear you no fortune if eaten— the ancients lied. The kidneys? No, they were ignored altogether. Now the thorax is probably what you are most interested in— the lungs, the heart, that all too popular organ among your profession. As you can see, St. Valentine himself would not have liked it; it is not attractive. Now tell me, poet: will this be enough to write your poem about your artist, this Luca Signorelli? The Necessary Fiction 181 Does this really help you understand how or why he dissected his only son’s dead body? INflueNce Not even fever can conjure the stars above Florence just before sunrise. Yet we know that centuries ago it did, or maybe it was the other way around. Mrs. X, we were told, died in severe respiratory distress. The pathologist, our teacher (Mrs. X’s lungs in his hands), mumbled something about the influence of the stars. I will not attempt to imitate his accent. He is from somewhere in Eastern Europe, somewhere where they really like black bread, even late in the evening before bed; this, and more, he had mentioned before. But Mrs. X, her lungs consolidated, dusky, hemorrhagic, was our true lesson that day, dare we forget the purpose of our studies. Given a minor portion of her history, a chance to examine her lungs thoroughly, not one of us made the correct diagnosis. And so, we were dismissed, given one hour, a luxury we were told, to ascertain the true cause of demise. Seated at the microscope, we examined, 182 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy one after another, Mrs X’s slides, each of us noting the classic cytoplasmic inclusions, the overwhelming inflammation. Only then did we understand what our teacher understood long before looking under a microscope— Influenza: under the gravest influence of the stars. ToRN There was the knife and the broken syringe then the needle in my hand, the Tru-Cut followed by the night-blue suture. The wall behind registration listed a man with his face open. Through the glass doors, I saw the sky going blue to black as it had 24 hours earlier when I last stood there gazing off into space, into the nothingness of that town. Bat to the head. Knife to the face. They tore down the boy in an alleyway, the broken syringe skittering across the sidewalk. No concussion. But the face torn open, the blood congealed and crusted along his cheek. Stitch up the faggot in bed 6 is all the ER doctor had said. Queasy from the lack of sleep, I steadied my hands as best as I could after cleaning up the dried blood. There was the needle and the night-blue suture trailing behind it. There was the flesh torn and the skin open. I sat there and threw stitch after stitch trying to put him back together again. The Necessary Fiction 183 When the tears ran down his face, I prayed it was a result of my work and not the work of the men in the alley. Even though I knew there were others to be seen, I sat there and slowly threw each stitch. There were always others to be seen. There was always the bat and the knife. I said nothing, and the tears kept welling in his eyes. And even though I was told to be“quick and dirty,” told to spend less than 20 minutes, I sat there for over an hour closing the wound so that each edge met its opposing match. I wanted him to be beautiful again. Stitch up the faggot in bed 6. Each suture thrown reminded me I would never be safe in that town. There would always be the bat and the knife, always a fool willing to tear me open to see the dirty faggot inside. And when they came in drunk or high with their own wounds, when they bragged about their scuffles with the knife and that other world of men, I sat there and sutured. I sat there like an old woman...