Poem for Thursday and Electric Blooms

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs 

By Renee Nicole Macklin 

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i've donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

               ribosome

               endoplasmic—

               lactic acid

               stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills --

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can't point to anymore, maybe my gut --

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it's the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

now i can't believe—

               that the bible and qur'an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths "make room for wonder" --

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

-------- 

This award-winning student poem was written by Renee Nicole Macklin, later Renee Nicole Good, murdered this week by ICE. Here is the fundraiser to support her wife and son. 

I was up half the night with an upset stomach, so I slept late on Thursday and kind of dragged all morning reading, then showering. It didn't help that it stayed deeply overcast and dark all day. I did some cleaning after lunch and eventually we walked in the gloom to the park, which today had more ravens than ducks on the beach. 

We watched the Fiesta Bowl, which was an exciting game and I'm delighted that Miami won! I had my usual Thursday chat, and now we're watching more of The Winter King, still extremely violent and bloody and the same Merlin who supports baby murder in the name of the gods opposes abortion. Flowers at Bellevue Botanical Garden d'Lights: