Courtney Hitson

Bioethics and a Sestina: On a 19th Century Body Snatcher

that trespasses a family plot to steal
a corpse from her grave and bring the body
to a medical school. There, a teaching surgeon will seize
his scalpel down the sternum to part her mottled curtains of skin,
unfurl her shutters of lungs, and birth her glistening heart
into a dusty heaven of eyes,

whose sightlines enwrap her torso. But what if her eyes
opened to see this? Would she allow these students to steal
memories of her stomach and bones and heart?
Who, exactly, inhabits an abandoned body
once a self evaporates from beneath the skin?
Because if her father knew, he’d seize

his daughter’s corpse, despite the procedure a student sees.
And despite the eventual stare of his son’s cancelled eyes,
as he fingers the boy’s cold skin
a final time, once a tumor comes to steal
his smirk and gallop. Why? Because nobody
knew how to extract a tumor from a heart.

Could surgical instruction be a pastiche art?
Consider: with varying intentions researchers seize
a knowledge, disembody
it from the dead, and realize
it back to being within the osteal
lodgings of a future patient’s skin.

We cannot negate the risk in
resurrecting purpose into an unbeating heart.
What is to come of knowledge that we steal,
like a virus plundering know-how from the seas
of our cells? What if we can’t help wanting to eye
a corpse and scorch the earth of her body

for cures? There is no antibody
for ambition. Picture the body snatcher: Skin
of his fingers sweaty, his opportunistic eyes,
busy as the surgeon’s hands grasping that heart
with a pride similar to the father’s upon seizing
his loving son—a boy he couldn’t fathom ever steal.

Not yet, anyways. But look at his unfinished heart
in his unfinished body and know it will eye risk in what he sees:
Especially in the unused shovel, all gleam and steel.

Courtney Hitson teaches creative writing and literature at Georgia College & State University. Her poems have recently appeared in Pinch, The Potomac Review, Wisconsin Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, DMQ Review and others. She has a sestina (over the history of neonatal care) forthcoming in The Mid-Atlantic Review. Collectively, her poetry has received five Pushcart nominations. Outside of writing, she enjoys scuba-diving, unicycling, and philosophy.