My Autopsy

by Michael Dickman

There is a way

if we want

into everything

I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the

small and glowing loaves of bread

I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress

floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks

like water at night

The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese

poems

You eat the forks,

all the knives, asleep and waiting

on the white tables

What do you love?

I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on

despite worms or fire

I love our stomachs

turning over

the earth

There is a way

if we want

to stay, to leave

Both

My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air

particles of skin

The invisible floating universe of kisses, rising up in a sequinned

helix of dust and cinnamon

Breathe in

Breathe out

I smoke

unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes

from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them

here, and I’ll smoke them

There

There is a way

if we want

out of drowning

I’m having

a Gimlet, a Caruso, a

Fallen Angel

A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, a Stinger, an Angel

Face, a Corpse Reviver

What are you having?

I’m buying

I’m buying for the house

I’m standing the round

Wake me

from the dash of lemon juice,

the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy,

and the two fingers of gin

that make up paradise

There is a way

if we want

to untie ourselves

The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark

There are lots of stories about intestines

People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake

The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new

bright plastic curled around the older brother

Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned

Some people climb them into Heaven

Others believe we live in one

God’s intestine!

A conveyor belt of stars and saints

We tie and we loosen

Minor

and forgettable

miracles