He slides his card;
we are walking in step now, into the frozen room
where the girls lie open on their spines,
some shelved neatly, information copied from them already.
There is a catalog: scenes carved on their corneas,
a particular call recorded on scrap, and flowcharts
that show what the warm nerves retrieved.
There are books of landscapes, not paged too hard,
and of portraits, the edges worried to felt;
some wiry pastebooks of letters, too precious for most—
the elder ones never exchanged leaves written wet.
Then, the images taken from outside, hand-treated by specialists
in the periods in the colors that were seen that year.
The costumes change, from fat animals and letters
to the sly overlock of prey, parts of its shelter
trimmed off it in patterns. And the secrets,
wound like great rolls of insulation, slivered and slow-killing:
the batting is in their throats, you can bring it up with a pick.
We cannot look elsewhere for long, away from these girls
with the shocking splits at their centers..
On the young ones there are no motes, or even hair:
a swab comes up clean. In their elders,
tormented tick-bites from plucking, and a deflated look,
like a container overfilled and then emptied.
There is food, still nipped by the caecum;
the throats raw, as if they had been scraped.
I look under their tongues, the insides of their joints,
for the irritations prized by collectors, strange men
in countries where roads turn to mud after rain
and much of life is in the mind. There are those
who have a taste for the damaged: who will pay highly
for one distressed just so.
Some of the girls are marked like veterans,
their successors healed over. They do not hold the cut:
you can see the new pith fighting the destruction: fibrin nets over bruises,
the meaty weave of footprints, with gouges like inked stamps.
They lead to me, a file of lower beings
telling some wormy finale, cortex a round helmet
over the snake-brain. The membrane
is reaching up my throat already,
a heavy tarp staked deep. We stand with our scopes,
like hunters with a long wake of kill,
and leave them on their stainless tables,
blood piled on their spines, the entry sealed.
T. M. De Vos completed her MFA at New York University in 2004. She is the recipient of a Summer Literary Seminars fellowship and a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan. Her work has appeared most recently in Gloom Cupboard, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review, HOBART, Dossier Journal, Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette, Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly, Sakura Review, The Whistling Fire, Shady Side Review, Umbrella Factory Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. She is a staff member of Many Mountains Moving, a performer with the Poetry Brothel, and a contributor to Fiction Writers Review.