Self-Portrait as Girl Being Led On
I watched them do it,
their small, fat fingers taking
to the swell of chest a blunt scalpel
and peeling, no, sawing into stomach
their fitful curiosity, the frog’s
glass eye staring outward and empty,
staring toward the very mouths of schoolboys
who entered so brutally the crevice, the abdomen’s
silenced bell. How gingerly
they lifted intestine, kidney,
the heart’s own gray bead, placed
them side by side on the table, their pens
marking quadrants, angles, here
we have stripped the body’s interior—here
we have mapped progress in the form
of a thievery. When was it
that I looked at the frog’s poor brain, feeling
the animal of my blood shift
around the hush of a shared current,
an electric storm’s spark gathered
between fingers that worked at buttons, zippers,
teased from lip a word, any word,
to signal a nerve’s calm, and there we sat
on the twin bed, pulsing—held
a bundle of knives in our hands, marked
the fastest entry, the cleanest
cut. Watched him take with his arms
the lung, liver,
the vein’s long thread—place them
side by side on blankets, on pillows lined
with the excess of my need, that cruel tenet
of promise. I didn’t realize
that when they kill them, the frogs,
they do it painlessly, as painless as a needle
slipped through the neck’s soft dip,
the point of severance saved for those
who look only forward to the palm’s
safest weight—what do they hear,
other than the quick snap,
the voided sense? I didn’t
know to enter through that door meant
there would be no swift exit, no closure
or stitch—I didn’t know
that when the boys had finished their movement,
their hour, they would simply unpin the frog’s feet,
the wrists, and drop it down
into the bin.
