Dissection Lab

The goal of today’s lesson is to learn

The parts of a flower. A real example, she says –

The living kind; the plastic prototypes, the paper cuttings

            Do not suffice; disdainful, her sentiment.  

She takes it out of a bag, our first patient –

A stem of sunflower,

And lays it down on a bed of wax.

We surround the table, a nervous school of surgeons,

Our fingers, eager, our eyes, observant, our minds,

Scribbled with studied notecards.

And in a few minutes, a fresh new blade is

            Squeezed between her practiced fingers, and she makes
A perfect slit through its chest; a bloodless cut, that extends
            Down to its boneless waist, then up to its sticky skull,

Peeling off its arms, in the process, its ring of golden petals,

And an umbrella of crying ovaries.

 

We learn its parts with no mistake, feeling over and over again,

            The shredded organs, with a pinch of sharp forceps –

Tweezers, dissection scissors, geometry dividers –all

            Engorged under the gaze of a magnifying glass;

The ligules, the disc florets with its neck of V

            On which sits a honey bee, and pollinates,

Makes more, the rapid hum of ancestry.

And having mastered, within an hour,

            The complex anatomy of a flower,

We wrap in paper, the cold corpse of our mute altruist,

            And flick it into a can of trash, wherein lies

A constellation of departed sisters, the flower cadavers,

            While the eggs in their sacs, toss and turn,

Still itching for a man.