Dissecting Cats
Someone mummified them in formaldehyde
That kept them from descending
The rest of the way down into death
Like someone stopped on the stairs by a word
The smell hovered about our hands all day
Despite the latex gloves we wore
Putting us off our lunches
We leaned in in pairs at Formica tables
Cutting the cats open like old sofas of the 70s
Cut open in a pinch in search of change
The connective tissue parting like smoke
Beneath the Exacto knives we wielded inexactly
Nothing looked like it did in the book
The organs cartoonish and color-coded
What we might have recognized
Our scalpels made green-brown messes of
After all it wasn’t surgery we were doing
Nor was it autopsy
We knew how they had died
Mercifully at the at-cat-capacity shelter
Where they’d been dropped off
After being lured by tuna onto porches
It was a joke to think
Anyone would adopt them
They were fed last meals and gassed
Then delivered in coolers to the high school
Mr. Weiland had ordered a dozen
Spacey and epileptic we’d been told
To be prepared to hold his head in case
He had a seizure to keep him
From cracking his skull open on the floor
He feared failures of the city grid
Flickering lights that could trigger another
Drank coffee out of a graduated beaker
His fingers ghostly with chalk
Years after we graduated ourselves
He’d be caught looking at porn
On a school computer
But that day he looked over our shoulders
As we pointed vaguely enough to be right
At the heart kidneys liver bladder spleen
While the cat lay stretched out like a cat
Lying on top of a sofa in window sun
Her flat tinny eyes like the eyes of mackerel
What right did we have to intrude
On those dark cavernous rooms
Like anthropologists opening pharaohs’ tombs
Despite rumors of curses
They had given their lives to bored kids
Wearing Vans and Abercrombie & Fitch hand-me-downs
An eye on the clock an ear on the bell
The only thing that managed to rouse us
Was finding one of them
Had been pregnant
The pair who’d gotten her
Would exclaim as if over lottery luck
And everyone would gather to watch
The litter (just two or three) being set aside
A futile caesarian
The kittens were the only things
We were certain we could identify
So this calico had been a mother then
It made it all appropriately sad
Though having never been born
Could it even be said that
The kittens had died
What was it we really learned
In those steep hours climbing
Towards lunches we couldn’t stomach
Maybe only that it is the fate of some
To be opened and of others
To remain closed like the hundred doors
Of a grand house that belonged
To a great family now fallen