TRAIL GUIDE TO THE BODY (3RD EDITION) by Lenna Mendoza
I saw the sacred and profane over my mother’s shoulder.
The massage therapy textbook held a naked man
in reverent stance, palms upturned at his sides.
There, in the field otherwise unsullied, he stood or laid.
His expression hard, but neutral. Eyes shut
and skinned, lids pink as the inside of my mouth.
I believed he had not emptied out, that thoughts still whirred
beneath the brush stroke fibers twisting under and over
the echo of bones that filled his chest. I learned he was not
alone when she flipped to find his kin, a legion of identical men
refusing each other’s gaze. Pages fell, bodies accumulated
and scattered, butchered into limbs, curled or tensed,
a wet red bouquet. What surface remained I found at the edges,
enough to make certain the bodies’ race, a white drape
down the bicep, pale ears, near bloodless toes. The men looked
nothing like my father. Less still when out came their perfect,
plaqueless hearts. But those bodies were the truth,
the way she studied them, and they looked nothing like us.
Have you ever seen an anatomical model of a child?
Are the parts smaller or closer together? Do they appear
less like meat? Whatever a page privileges, flesh is flesh
and mine was fine for practice. What did Mom see when she dug
her thumb beneath my shifted shoulder blade to strip the muscle?
Was it my bones protruding, littler than those of her classmates?
Or, for a moment, did I become her impossible textbook Adam?
