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| Lawrence Kessenich |
Lawrence Kessenich won the 2010 Strokestown International Poetry Prize. His poetry has been published in Sewanee Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry Ireland Review and many other magazines. He has a chapbook called Strange News and two full-length books, Before Whose Glory and Age of Wonders. He has had three poems nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Kessenich has also published essays, had short plays produced at festivals in Boston, New York and Durango, Colorado, and his first novel, Cinnamon Girl, will be published in September 2016.
Mortality
It
was my job to retrieve the body from the giant cooler.
I’d
wheel it on its gurney to the autopsy table, remove the cold
white
sheet, slide the corpse off the cart onto the table. It was
part
of my job at the hospital near my college. The night before
my
first autopsy, I lay in bed terrified, my girlfriend holding me
as
I contemplated being alone with a dead body in a basement.
That
was what freaked me out, not the prospect of watching
a
white-coated man cut someone from breastbone to pubic mound.
One
day, that someone was a man I knew, my father’s old boss, dead
of
cancer while I was on call. I asked the pathologist if I could leave,
if
it got to be too much, but learned a lesson about mortality that
day.
The
man I pulled onto that table, the body the doctor sliced wide open,
was
no longer the man I’d known, the man whose grass I’d cut.
Whoever
he had been at the core, whatever had animated
his
gruff voice and green eyes, had simply departed. Seeing that
made
it difficult for me, a budding atheist, not to believe
in a soul. The body the doctor and I took apart that day was inert
as
the Visible Man model I’d disassembled as a boy, each organ
tucked
neatly against the other as we removed them
one
by one. A man is not just the sum of his parts. Something,
goes
along for the ride, something that makes us who we are—
until
it leaves us cold, ready for the knife and the grave.
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