What we’re made of

Robert McNamara

Like frogs we pithed to see a spinal reflex work--
the split esophagus still moved a tiny fly.
And dime-store mice for pets we sacrificed and scoured
inside out for parasites. You wouldn’t want
to know. And fetal pigs, injected colored rubber in
their arteries and veins. A friend in high school hoped
to be a surgeon, lunched while autopsies were done
to see how bodies came apart. I ate with him
one time and watched a skull cracked open like a soft-
boiled egg. The chest. The heart removed and weighed.

The room had tiles like yellowed teeth and dusty shelves
of pickled organs. Freaks and sports. His identity
was someone else’s memory on Polaroids,
the colors long ago gone wrong. As my uncle stands
on a Jersey beach in his bucket hat, holding his Schlitz.
An alcoholic, years dead. They weighed his liver, his heart.
And the cruelties his children knew or couldn’t know? 
How friendship frayed like telomeres, a telos, merely.
Our failures eat at us. They have their purposes.

Robert McNamara is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent Incomplete Strangers (Lost Horse Press). My poems have appeared widely: in anthologies, including The Book of Irish-American Poetry (Notre Dame) and The Sorrow Psalms (Iowa), and in a couple of dozen magazines, among them Agni, Field, Gettysburg Review, Image, Measure, Notre Dame Review, Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, and Sewanee Review. He also published a co-translation of the poetry of the Bengali poet Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, The Cat Under the Stairs (EWU Press). And for a good number of years, he was a small press editor and publisher.