The Scientist (I)

It mocks me,
Eyes colder than liquid nitrogen,
Nothing left kindled in its stare;
I grow tired of standing on the shoulders of men
Who turned out to be dwarfs and not giants,
On tiptoes, buoyed by significant correlations,
I turn a sharp monotone of phrase
But cannot reach, cannot breach at
All, just to see the face of the one
Who brings me no peace,
Just pieces and particles that bear no names,
The type of work that drives on me,
Inspires madness and sadness and laughter,
The sound of spinning and grinding
And cutting and binding
Me.

Cell Culture

An unspecified suspension
(Pink, sometimes sallow)
Always elicits his attention
(Strident, never shallow)

A conical kind of life
(Sustained quality, not size)
Passages between his eyes
(Downward bent and filtered)

We can’t see them, he says,
I believe they are there.

Dissection (II)

Her first cut. Dull.
But penetrating the skin
So soft and so easily sliced
The tiny elastic tendrils, the embrace.

She wields the blade. Quivering
Cadaver carved into skin and flesh
Never again one tissue, one body,
One person.

Her knife fails against the yellow sheath,
Webbed by blue and red, vasculature once.
Beautiful work. Intimacy apparent in
Her face, taut with satisfaction.

She can no longer recognize him or hate him for who he was.

His Nightmares

He sat at his desk and watched the setting sun turn the grass from green to orange yellow to evening shadow. Motionless seconds turned to hours to days all lost in his thoughtfulness. He sits at his desk in such darkness that he can longer see or write on the papers in front of him or even keep his eyes open. Only the piles of paper keep his head up.

In his eyes, fires burn. Blue, the hottest of all flames, flows outward. He is himself the source of the burn, the arsonist, but he cannot douse or fight fire. So, it slowly consumes the house, his wife of smiling white teeth and black skin, his daughters of no significant age, and himself. Before long, nothing is left except a pile of green now worth nothing.

After Taking the MCAT

I will never hold the surgeon's knife,
Because I did not find the kidneys on the abdominal wall.
I will never prescribe drugs for anyone,
Because I did not hydrolyze amines to carboxylic acids.
I will never be a doctor.