Previously published by Philadelphia Stories in Fall of 2008

 

 

At The Mutter Museum of Medical Oddities

It’s a miracle we survive at all,

I say, as we walk the cases,

wincing at a colon as big as a stove pipe,

scowling at ribs deformed

by corsets, and spines collapsed

into little broken heaps, the horns

and warts and tumors

jutting out of waxen faces,

carbuncles and gouty toes,

a lady whose fat has turned her into soap.

But my brother, being a man, jokes on.

He sees a petrified penis and gasps,

I’ll never look at beef jerky the same way again,

as I giggle and cringe.

Until a whole wall of bloodless

babies in jars breaks over us like a wave,

all stages of fetal development,

followed by the terrible web of maladies;

so many damaged dolls,

each one a lesson in fragility.

He points to the anencephalic ones,

saying they look like trolls,

but then a lonely floater

in its little sea of tears

sends him into silence,

for we could be at the grave

of the little ghost he’s been

tethered to for seventeen years:

his first girl, all tangled in her cord,

born still and cold as snow.

I can’t bring myself

to tell him about the tiny

pearl of a zygote my heart tows.