This submission won second place in the Synapse Storytelling Contest creative writing category.
Child, I
lay him supine upon the funereal table
viburnum-skinned, blent
with the humorless chalcedony cloth and
dehumanized latex hands.
Beyond displaced sternum and steel jaws
pumps the inarticulate crimson mass —
scalpel-kissed sweatiness singing
the drums of a dirge to a halt, deposed by
an apt apparatus of spinning wheels and licorice ribbons twitching.
Stooped over, surgeon’s eye in mind, I
vapidly stare,
anastomose analytics, and incise
precisely, perfectly upon the flesh, the flesh.
The chest of Pandora I open, finding all plagues and little
hope.
A head of geraniums, a fruit of Eden.
Sinew and blood, heavy as anvils,
the lead laden child, a child,
but a child.
Stitch him up I do,
bit by bit, suture the linen skin,
seal the cavity, the tomb, the tomb,
encasing a dead heart risen.
Now he lies, tubes and pale skin.
Tape and crinkly blankets.
An ostensibly fissured thorax.
A posy of sanguine roses and white chrysanthemum.
Lest I turn into wires or stone,
scavenge my sorrow and my woe from
the vivisection of a beleaguered heart
and find
youth chasmed from hope
far far far.
