Put scalpel to skin, electrocautery to tissue, saw to middle sternum. Incise pericardium, then aorta. Place one finger to plug the hole that you have made. Cannulate, stop the heart. Years later, my father would confess, as a boy, you moved in such a way that I found feminine. Suture grafts to coronary vessels. Tie seven knots per stitch. Dr. Nicolosi, in his office, said, I have patients happily married to women, men who went to bathhouses. Lower the head, return volume to the heart. My mother would say, the saddest thing is to die alone. Control the heart’s new rhythm, control the bleeding that is there, yes, men who go to bathhouses and wire the halves of the sternum shut.
Half-sedated in the fridge’s cold, piled in brown paper bags like broccoli, swaying their long antennae, their rubber-banded pincers, alive, far from the crags of marine ground and the taste of dark salty water. I remember seven lobsters at a dinner party of seven friends: how we put pots onto the stovetop, brought water to a boil, held each to our faces, inspecting the ugly carapace of bodies, the black fish-eggs of eyes, liquid passing into steam, their hundred thousand neurons electric. I remember one lobster splaying its claws, some benthic insect or angel surprised by its own wing span exceeding a pot’s diameter, how I hid my face, happier to commit cruelties without knowing, until we dropped lobsters one by one and I watched through a glass lid when two kept moving longer than seemed humane, except what is humanity when it comes to lobsters becoming more beautiful when they are boiled. And we marveled at that deep red their speckled brown shells became, salivated in thickening kitchen air, twisted tails from thoraxes, hungry for white meat drenched in butter and brine, our hands covered in both. Is it erotic or monstrous that I picture you sucking my flesh off of bone? Except I am not a lobster, and I would eat them again and again, for the taste.
One resident teaching two students means three swaying black stethoscopes like the gentle trunks of elephants sniffing at a woman’s chest, hollow rubber sending her electric charges into the coils of my ear, into the blue spark of recognition that I am lonely, very lonely, as the doctor mimics this specific heart’s systolic murmur with the same mouth he uses to kiss his wife and deliver bad news, as our patient’s eyes fix themselves onto the window’s elsewhere and try to crack the glass: I am learning today how a mother elephant lies down beside her child’s body, stops eating, drinking, suffers a broken heart, another animal that is capable of grief.
Joe Tobias is a surgeon and poet in Portland, Oregon. His recent work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars.
At first glance these intricate depictions of the moon might seem like photographs from the Apollo space program of 1961–75. In fact they were captured a century earlier by an ingenious and wholly land-based Scottish astronomer. Peering through a self-made telescope, James Nasmyth sketched the moon’s scarred, cratered and mountainous surface. Aiming to “faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow” he then built plaster models based on the drawings, and photographed these against black backgrounds in the full glare of the sun. As the technology for taking photographs directly through a telescope was still in its infancy, the drawing and modeling stages of the process were essential for attaining the moonly detail he wanted. From the Public Domain Review
