Dayna Patterson
$6.65, sale price, pig heart in pericardium.
Piglets with eyes seamed closed, petal ears
pressed back, $12.95.
Segmented earthworms
stacked like stiff straws, $4.90 for 10.
Leopard
frogs, $1.70 each, translucently green. A one-year
guarantee on all products leads me to ponder
how to read this pledge: the lamprey
is truly dead,
will not revivify for at least twelve months, apply
its toothed suck to your neck. Or a promise
against premature disintegration—the skinned cat's
cells won’t start to shred themselves
beneath lablight. Not for fifty-two weeks.
Or maybe it's a vow that her dying
yowl won't unspine scalpels, make latex feel
too thin. The catalogue emphasizes humane.
One would hope it includes firm assurance, then,
that the Dogfish
Shark (18-22", $7.25) won't hound
buyers' dreams, that sting
rays and octopi and squid
won't ghost them, a billowing
phantom wake. This catalogue has beached
death, somehow, on my work desk, and I've spent
too much time with someone else's mail,
an iron-stomached someone, a bespectacled Jane,
familiar with the smell of formaldehyde and the costs
of pig
parts, the steep prices, when I could've
sent it on without a second glance,
or third, fourth, fifth. Sheep
fetus,
VacPac, $35.50. Pig uterus
with embryos, $11.00,
their tiny snouts
nosing a slit. Remembering
how my knife hand shook over the frog's
smooth stomach, the F on my report—
all the organs look the same.