The Meadow 49 Autopsy Kira Mastalka I could spend the rest of my life writing about you and still never find the right words to use. you are like a cadaver, dead skin pulled away, torn muscles on display for students—a lesson not to become so enamored with the dead and dying that you allow the living to rot while you’re not looking. your dead smile, mouth stuffed with lavender and the ashes of palo santo to cover the stench, visits me every night in my sleep. I see your face in the reflection of my mother’s silver and I wonder, would you have brought flames to these too? I imagine you coming undone like a rag doll, your spine becomes the zipper and your skin unravels like spools of silk—softer in their touch than you ever were. they call the ribs a cage, but I would argue that yours is more of a nest, one you buried yourself so deeply in, you got lost in your own hollow chest. thoracic cavity empty when you handed me your heart, the tendons in each chamber severed by your own hand—the love you gave me was only a broken heirloom, handed down so many times you had forgotten who it even belonged to in the first place. foolishly, I believed this was not delicate—the autopsy we performed on each other. I should have known this was no more beautiful than a mortician painting the faces of the dead, brushing their hair and sewing their lips together in hopes that the living will look in wonder at their caskets, instead of in disgust.
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