Dissection
By Lesley Curwen
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
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Somebody said she had been a vagrant,
this body we flayed, unpeeled like an orange, all its pathways laboriously tracked by soft-skinned youths who leaned on its diminished nakedness, easy in our stained white coats. Muted hilarity was our answer to death, or talk of last night’s gig as we uncovered staring organs, accustomed our noses to the stink of preserving fluid, selected the right scalpels. It was not a person to us, though we dubbed it Elsie. The sole moment of horror came when the supervisor deployed a saw to snap the sternum, bend back the ribs like a blown cage to show the secrets within. Those grating teeth, close to a heart, offended our ears. We scribbled down a map of organ disease, cirrhosis, black-tarred lobes of lungs, and later washed a crust of brain matter out of our nails. I never completed the training, went on to do something else. Sometimes I wake up sorry for the sin of trespass. |
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Lesley Curwen is a poet and broadcaster from Plymouth, UK. She has been nominated for Pushcart and Forward Prizes. Her fourth collection is due this year from Atomic Bohemian.
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Author’s Note:
This piece, ‘Dissection’ is special to me because I have been carrying around guilt for a long time, over my practical anatomy classes from decades ago. I gave up my pathway in the medical field after the first year, and it seemed to me as though I had been awarded a grandstand view into another person’s body, without any justification. For me the key line is ‘It was not a person to us.’ It couldn’t be, really, and we were working on the body as a task, until it became a humdrum chore. But how much is given up when students or scientists can ‘park’ the understanding that what they are cutting up is the remains of a sentient, loving human being? I also wanted to explore the flawed nature of our beliefs about what it is to rest in peace.