Woman, Indeterminate Age, Has Changed Her Mind
(after a poem by Mathew Olzmann)
You’re never quite dead when they harvest you.
So you will curse the moral tone of the Procurer and her easy-fill form,
the swift-footed database matching your organic data,
the interns itching for cutting-edge experience, the surgeons
scampering in to the world premiere. You’ll be with them all the way:
prep, drape, aspirate, clamp, divide, irrigate, yank, sever.
You thought dying was bad enough
but you’ll remember none of these things. You’ll remember when you were ordering
takeaway milk in its too-large plastic beaker that squishes the milk into dribbles
down your hand, and what turns out to be a too small slice of blackcurrant
and lemon cheesecake, and the cashier says to your clutch of one-dollar
notes, Were you at a strip club last night? and you laughed and you
tried to ask Dancing on the table or stuffing them in her panties?
but you were laughing and the cashier was laughing and the
folks in the queue and those waiting for their orders
and the man chopping Italian parsley and the girl
separating egg yolks. And you remember that
you used to say Some of us are still here
only because suicide is messy. But now,
dying from the inside out—no help
needed—you don’t want to go.
You aren’t ready to be
harvested.