Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
Hair back, cheap goggles tied, sixteen
My teacher says this shock is what it’s like
To grow up, taking a scalpel to the skin
Of a female rat for ten AM anatomy,
Cold metal to a plum purple heart,
Still, small as the tip of my thumb.
It was just as the textbook said,
Look, look, there’s her heart,
Her ribs gray-white twigs we’d break
To reach it, her human tongue-colored lung.
I can’t look into her face like I can a dog’s,
Like I couldn’t the deer, really dead, very dead,
My headlights making the night remember her
For a moment, in the rearview mirror, I think
Who cleans her up? In a day, a week,
Only if her death sprawls onto someone’s driveway,
A garden, the lines of the road.
Not so much like the deer, this animal
Is meant to be here, anatomical secrets
Labeled, named, cold pinks, pale browns and fur
If I should sew her back up, call it accidental, I don’t
I scrub, deep, beneath my fingernails at the sink, my wrist,
The place on my face my gloves touched, my features
Reflected, stretched left, right in the faucet’s silver shine.
Katie Forrester is a student and writer at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. She is an English major and primarily writes poetry and short stories on issues of girlhood, feminism, religion, and the American South.