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.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Philadelphia Stories in Summer 2008

  Sunflowers

Vincent understood them: the way they yield

their darkling faces to the sun,

aflame for its arcing shimmer dance

across the day’s mysterious expanse,

how big they are, how weighty, over grown,

the way they lean together in the fields,

conspiring to hold each other up, creak and groan

as their heads reach critical mass, aswarm with too much seed.

He gathered them in vases, painted
their petaled fall from grace,

bunched together, shy, askew
and awkward, out of place,

caught their surprise at being indoors,
the droop and shrug of leaves,

the way they suddenly dropped,
losing all of their color.

Too painful to paint them
riotous at the roadside in full bloom:

signs of what we were before
the crows moved in to feed.