Inconveniences Rightly Considered

III. Convo

  where six typically pot-luck ladies

  ooh and aah over

  various bits of viscera

  I, a three-year-old, grow

  fast best friends with formalding –

  scent of dead – there I lay –

  I see me now – upon formica –

  suspended dead one

  suspended on

  dead steel

  and pinned

  with little metal pins.

  My brother's twenty-pound cat

  passes and his

  wife asked for cremation

  so there sits

  in the midst of a roomful of Xbox controllers

  wine bottles

  acoustic guitars

  on top of the shelves that hold the current tech for owning films

  And half-finished classic literature

  a cedar chest full of

  Big John's Ashes

  a picture of them holding him

  -- all together now, he's heavy, lift together –

  his collar on top

  an expired rabies tag attached by a bendable grip

  hook

  I was made to dissect a fetus

  of a pig in public school.

  formaldehyde

  smell it?

  black permanent marker

  cat

  II. Meal

  (No thanks, I'm off of bacon for the month. Why? I heard the pig's anatomically closest to me, to man. That kosher with you?)