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Mezzanine

Page 4

by Zoe Hitzig


  proud to call me his. / I am the stone. Lost at sea. There is a hole. At my

  center. / It takes a special. Power to remain here.

  And belong to a different. Man every so often. To

  change hands. / I am still dense with value. Why

  am I missing the center. / The hands hold me as. The grains

  of sand that outline the stone / of Gibraltar. Only the sea is my owning!

  Mine. I am. / I am the stone lost at sea. The hole is my center. / Without

  me the richest man would not be rich. Several / Others would be evicted.

  That is how money works. / I am still dense with value. Right where

  I’m missing a center. / So say I cannot reproduce / But am worth

  more in baskets than was quarried for. / Am the stone. Lost at

  sea. There is a hole. / My center. I am still, I am the missing.

  Difference Engine

  Born, never asked.

  As biofilm huddles

  in a freshwater fissure

  of the dead sea floor.

  Born, never asked.

  Like the swollen

  recruit at the bottom

  of the pyramid.

  Born, never asked.

  Tasked uniformless

  in a torn-open trench

  with a machine gun.

  Born, never asked.

  Into this jetbridge

  full of people who.

  Who are they.

  Born, never asked

  to enter the engine.

  Engine’s bronze gears

  and double-high teeth.

  Born, never asked.

  Now shivering

  down the fire

  escape in a column . . .

  Enter a window

  to a dark room

  full of a person.

  Add. Exit to shiver

  down another

  floor. One of us

  per column per

  floor. The us floor

  then leave. On one

  floor my difference

  is a woman. I add

  her. Have I

  added no one.

  Before this floor.

  Make the room

  warm enough to feel

  my mouth. It stings.

  I’m not preparing

  to leave. Don’t count-

  down. Leave me or

  (fissure pyramid jet-

  bridge trench eng-

  ine) could the funct-

  ion be.

  Pernkopf Atlas (I)

  Volume Two. Thorax, Abdomen and Extremities,

  with 378 Illustrations, Most in Color.

  Apt that Fig. 1 presents external form of a female

  breast and chest, surface, grayscale,

  intact and mapped region by region

  with a fan of bayonets sketched to this or that

  latinate term. Each term a whisper, a small assertion

  taken as consent, collateral. As ransom.

  Preparatory work done to gain access to deeper

  regions (e.g. the cutting of muscles, reflection of parts,

  disarticulations and separation of muscles and blood

  vessels by means of retractors) has not been explained

  in the legends when the steps in the preparation were

  self-evident.

  The human figure is self-evident, I have often thought—

  its only evidence is itself. We draw definitions to learn,

  draw nude models in studio classrooms to learn

  about shadow, draw the dead to discover what casts it

  and why definition does not always suffice.

  Draw with Fig. 88, the hand, collateral. An extremity’s

  extremity. Fingers, more extreme. Ring

  and pinky ones untouched touching the page.

  The cut begins at top-center of the middle finger

  fingernail down the now-blue tendon

  to the watchline. Another cut, perhaps along it.

  There is a crease on my wrist where my hairband sits

  when I sleep with my hair down. There is always hair

  where extremity begins. On pulled-away skin, the flap,

  a tattoo which even in death this hand cannot escape,

  a signature heavy with, without. Signature

  is an invention of death, in fact, like words

  themselves. Anatomie des menschen or untermenschen?—

  semantics too are life or deadly. And legacy. In Fig. 321:

  legacy parallels legs the way a willow in a Viennese garden

  affirms and denies the city with its branches. What branch

  am I and where do the veins in my left and right hands

  coalesce on their long journey back to the heart?

  Exquisite drawings make answers too precise.

  Did the anatomists ever climb out of themselves

  to watch from above, from dorsal then ventral view,

  ever survey their desks with watercolors, cadavers,

  surrounding brushes, pencils, palettes also

  scalpels, forceps, occasionally drawn into view?

  This intersection of craft and thought, body at

  the center, accretes meaning with every

  blot, every nib, I begin

  to smell

  the flesh

  as it gets

  torn away,

  layers—

  lips and

  labia—

  wettest

  in life

  sourest

  in death

  but not

  to be mis-

  taken for

  protest

  as my own many-times-great grandfather, grandson of a

  Useful Jew applied current to the brain, to cortices

  of Prussian soldiers with already-fractured skulls.

  And the first Jew to win a Nobel Prize?

  He discovered barbituric acid, from which all barbiturates

  are still made—no coincidence, as Nobel invented

  dynamite, the merchant of death is dead

  his premature obituary read before he invented

  the prize:

  for the advancement

  of; for me and

  for; for four

  dismissed; for

  sciens, scientis;

  for the opposite

  of ephemera;

  for the lusty;

  for illustrators;

  for the

  illustrated;

  for the illustrious;

  for the luster

  on the back of a man

  waiting to enter

  the gas chamber.

  The lights

  are also hot on the withers of a filly

  on a conveyor belt in the modern abattoir.

  She might shiver. He will not. Turn a page

  and you will wonder what scalding bronze poured

  down your trachea might feel like. I feel it now.

  I let it harden and if you tear my flesh away you will

  do me a favor because Harvard Medical School now boasts

  a four-to-one student-to-cadaver ratio and there is a waitlist

  to donate, while Burke and Hare’s death masks

  wink to each other over clemency in a museum

  overseas. Turn a page and you might hear—crunch—

  the sound of a stack of paper cut by a guillotine—

  crunch—might hear 1,871 slices—crunch—into

  the axial plane of a man who killed a man and after 12 years

  in a cell was injected, killed. He had offered to be sliced

  into millimeter-thick sheets yielding 65 gigabytes of images

  which demand more than 8 MacBooks

  to view. Sign me up. I too will get immortal as we build

  cathedrals for relics before worship. Now we have a rose

  window to replace the old, a better newer millimeter-thin

  sta
ined plastinate made from a cross-section

  of a noble condemned who gave his body to Science and

  the sometimes-true. The wrist slices might replace

  our Eucharist, the priest must serve them as the wardens served

  two requested cheeseburgers the night of to the to-be-sliced

  who refused them. Who is my creator or yours? Fig. 378.

  According to the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act

  the skin binds a book, by the law of collateral damage.

  Pernkopf Atlas (II)

  Volume One. Head and Neck. Making love I wonder

  were they thinking of it. Of the end as I do each time?

  The red of eight years softed pale by their last three months,

  by prison, now the pink of the skin between my thumb

  and forefinger, almost translucent, not transparent, dumb with

  effort stretched in two directions, comfortable when rounded

  against this cylinder, pressed against the intimate, inanimate,

  against all that stands too tall against liberty. I hear their

  sighs with me and go to them. Hear the pink and read red

  as the red orchestra, brilliant, uncaptured, never watercolor.

  Something flowers in her. So rarely are women criminals

  we know little about female parts. So rarely, in fact,

  this Nazi anatomy is used to demonstrate that rape

  itself is contraception. Yes someone actually believes that,

  he lives a short flight from me, a flight to get on which

  I wouldn’t even get frisked. Remember that stern airport security

  woman in Amsterdam, tight burnt orange with buttons?

  Ran her hands all over concentrated two fingers on my labia,

  pressed hard into them, why did she let me pass?

  I think of her when I slip into kilt and roll the waistband

  to make hem clear keen knees more cleanly, unstuck

  to the slashes on the backs of them. How clean and tired

  the world in which we learn from kin alone. Do not dissect

  the frozen fetal pig, delivered from the gray warehouse.

  Slice open the pregnant one digging in your yard,

  flip it over and make one long clean cut along its pink-gray

  underbelly, the squeals will be enveloped by history the hungry,

  the shadow amoeba who emerges from your

  sternum in these moments for these sounds and scents, reach

  through the reddest red and fish out the fetus, relish

  the warpaint staining your kilt, make holy stigmata,

  laugh and lie on the lawn. Like Manet you will be loathed

  for the correct placement of the heart. Cut the umbilical cord

  and you can do science. History and men enjoy a peace

  they somehow feel they earned by buying bonds or listening to a speech.

  Remarkable meaning is accessible by private jet

  as there is no difference between holding bonds and holding

  someone in them. A bond is a promise to someday release, asking

  how to find meaning in such a world misses the point entirely.

  This is meaning—spontaneous, organized into new meaning

  as currency wanders from cigarette to bully mark in camps

  nearby and across the continent as exactly one thought

  arranges itself into exactly one action across time

  into crimes bigger than we ever meant to contain.

  As if Sikhs would give away cured meat for free forever. As if

  there were such a thing as death support. As if sex were a moral

  act. Our necks sticking to hair, hair standing in for veins,

  veins for arteries, are bloodless as carefully drawn legacy,

  wan as encephalon drawn in an anatomy book.

  Something flowers in her. I feel it too. I lust

  as they lust for life and believe: Believe with me

  in the just time that lets everything ripen.

  Gesture Atlas

  Here come the zeppelins

  their shapes shadow

  distance. Whales that leapt and stayed—

  as forecast as all

  becomes dirigible. Reverse thrust maneuver for

  mooring

  and there is a floor. Stepping out on it I press in

  with my sock

  with the equivocation of a neonate pony

  hair matted and

  curled by placenta, by the trauma of birth

  stained already

  as I am now with motion. With

  the hurry-fetch-it-now the

  will-I-or-will-I-not the am-I-

  late-to-touch or the amorous

  and the eucharist. I will not dress yet but inspect

  the space

  between my eyes as the primary purpose of

  gesture

  drawing is to facilitate the study of the human

  in motion.

  Through the wall someone is

  watching.

  Through the wall someone is watching

  a show.

  It is anime—I think—asymptotic legs bloody

  but unscratched

  from a fall from a tower with

  featureless, swift action.

  I become drawn and falling. Adopt

  the mission

  someone is saying. Search now for a missing cat.

  I have caves for eyes,

  crevasse for nose and I forget the cat.

  Find a man.

  A man with anamorphic

  memory.

  He looks sideways into my caves looks

  for dun horses aurochs

  line of dots in mineral pigment. None of us

  have names here.

  I suspect him a clone framed into body.

  He suspects mine.

  Slip hand into shirtsleeve. Find throwing blades.

  A tactical

  flamethrower and this flame too is a hand.

  What is it

  to have this world unhanded us.

  The alethic,

  the incomputable, the lethal

  and lethargic?

  The lethal mutation, forgetting before

  there is anything to

  forget. The legal rotation. Angle of Proserpina’s

  wrist upturned

  with Tamar and Dinah

  for Rindr and Cassandra

  and Leda and Philomela

  Medusa, Lucretia,

  the Sabine women—

  this is the hand

  that says what skin is left

  on my shoulder

  I will abscond away from memory,

  that city

  that could be moved to

  in a minute. The missing

  cat. The none-of-us-have-names-here.

  The calisthenic how-

  did-I-get-here. The joint crack of who-has-been-

  here. Was it

  the figure in the convolution of the curtain

  I notice now

  watching me? The figure presses

  the small of my back.

  I falter a step and step into a cave.

  The hands of men

  handle stacks of medallions, chips for the round.

  In this cave see

  paintings lurid by lichens, crystals and

  white

  mold someone has tried and failed to treat.

  Two caves as the time

  my face folded in half and my two eyes met.

  Two caves meeting

  are not one cave. Motionless inside this kiss

  kiss me this figure says play.

  Acknowledgments

  Many individuals and communities made this book imaginable, then possible. I owe uncountably infinite debts: to the team at Ecco, especially Daniel Halpern, Gabriella Doob, and Carolina Baizan, for the attentiveness and the opportunity; to my teachers; to the students of my teachers
; to my first readers; to my always listeners; to my inspirers, conspirers, mentors, and guiders; to Nature, for not giving up on us just yet; to my family, forever. Thank you.

  I am grateful to The Home School, the Artist Development Fund, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, and the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship for vital financial and institutional support.

  Several poems rely on research conducted with the help, guidance, and participation of extraordinarily open-minded and generous people. I am especially appreciative of staff and affiliates of the following institutions: the Innocence Project; the Countway Library of Medicine; the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge; the Huntsville Unit; and the Texas Prison Museum.

  Notes

  I LOOKED ON MY RIGHT HAND AND BEHELD takes its title from Psalm 142:4 (KJV).

  THE TAMPING IRON SPEAKS refers to the case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker, who improbably survived injury: an iron rod shot through Gage’s skull. The tamping iron is currently on display at Countway Library of Medicine.

  THE LEVEE SPEAKS draws on court records from the wrongful conviction of Damon Thibodeaux, who in 1996 was charged with strangling his step-cousin to death. After eight hours of questioning, he gave a false confession. He spent fifteen years on death row in Louisiana before being exonerated by DNA testing in 2012.

  ON ATRAZINE is for Tyrone Hayes, a biologist, activist, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered that atrazine, an herbicide sprayed on most cornfields in the U.S., causes hermaphroditism in frogs. Syngenta, the company that manufactures the chemical, has attempted to discredit Hayes’s research.

 

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