Mansi Shah
December 12, 2014
My hands are lost—
They peel away yellow flesh to
Uncover silicone pouches coarsened with
Time.
(The body
Wars with the unnatural.)
Naïve to our insides, we play
With scissors, probes, and fingers
Teasing apart nerve from vein.
Write about your first cut:
The plastic bag of bowels,
The manicured nails,
The pool of formaldehyde affectionately
Known as cadaver juice, and
The unconquerable palms and soles
Are the main characters in my tale.
But my real first cut:
I am sitting at the operating table,
Hands tensed in the sterile position
(Rewriting my body’s habitus).
I watch as she slices open the back of this man’s hand
The adrenaline hits—my heart is pounding—
See this muscle?
I nod.
It isn't usually here.
She quizzes me:
What’s this?
A tendon,
I pipe back.
(I passed. Knowledge I did not know I knew.
Constructing norms of the body’s
Architecture.)
She scrapes his bones and straightens
Them with metal rods
I snip sutures as she sews canyons into crevices
I walk outside—the air is dense, the
Sky seems deeper,
I am wide-eyed as ever
But somehow saturated with the
Knowledge of vessels laden with blood
And a little hardened—
Like the scar we drew by blade,
Slowly transforming from new to toughened.