Cadaver
The coldness of my body
Longs for the warmth of a soul.
The brain you hold in your hands
Hides memories in every sulcus
The warmth of my son’s little hand still lingers
In the fingers that you break.
The lifeless heart you poke
Is still throbbing with the love and pain
That has beaten through it
And gushed down the veins.
When you cut through these eyes
Do you see in them the beauty they’ve witnessed?
When you slice my lung open
Do you hear the whispers of the words I could not utter?
Do you see my weaknesses
Nestled within the lobes of my liver?
Do you feel the familiarity of my mundane life
Absorbed in every strand of my withering muscles?
Does your science assign to my shuffled organs
A gender I have refuted all my life?
But I don’t hold it against you
All I ask is that you treat me not as a cadaver
But as a life that once was.
