When medical students cut open my grandmother’s cadaver
by Kathryn Gilmore
“My War Against The Institutional Locks” by Brett Stout
There won’t be any fat to unpeel.
Just a thin slice into her blistered skin will do.
The tricky part, I imagine, will be the fascia,
tightly woven tissue encasing her organs
like silk-covered insects in a spider’s web.
That stubbornness, that pride of hers, will invade
every blood vessel. Surely the lessons
of her anatomy will parallel the ones
that used to pour from her mouth, a bleeding
wound. With blue-wrapped hands,
they’ll trace her esophagus and stomach
all barnacled with tumors. None would dare
comment on the smell. They’ll pass around
her heart, soft and fragile as a satin bag of rice.
Each pupil will raise the muscle to their face,
and for a moment, the gleam of the cold, fluorescent
light against the scarlet pillow will create the illusion
of movement, and they’ll want to return the organ
to the body it came from.
Kathryn Gilmore is a poet and MFA candidate at Syracuse University originally from Memphis, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in Stylus, Laughing Medusa, and Medical Humanities Journal as well as Mass Poetry’s “Future in Verse” chapbook. She is the recipient of various honors for her writing including Boston College’s Dever Fellowship. When not writing, you can find her working on her next crochet project.
Brett Stout is a 44-year-old artist and writer. He is a high school dropout and former construction worker turned college graduate and paramedic. He creates mostly controversial work usually while breathing toxic paint fumes from a small cramped apartment known as “The Nerd Lab” in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. His work has appeared in a vast range of diverse media, such as art and literature publications by NYU and Brown University.