Such a lovely reanimated corpse
or, should I say, corpses.
She rises from the slab,
thanks to her own spine and limbs
and insides reconstructed
courtesy of the unwitting generosity
of all manner of freshly dead.
Up in her cerebrum,
strangers meet as cortex
hippocampus and basal ganglia.
Her lungs once inhaled, exhaled
in the one who never saw it coming.
Her heart is enamored of its beats to come,
and a film star’s breasts
are sutured almost invisibly to her chest.
She’s got veins and blood and pressure enough
to fill her body,
while her nerves are learning brilliantly on the job.
But it’s the face that captures the eye:
not her own,
which was cut up by a shattered windshield
but a petite but solid skull
and an inspired skin wrap
that could launch more ships
than Helen of Troy.
Of course, personality is a problem,
as is morality.
For creator and creation
the curve of learning is steep
but, with her looks, she’s halfway there,
and the professor takes comfort
in the fact that, a half-hour into her new life,
she’s not once uttered those depressing words,
“We belong dead.”
Admiring her magnificence,
he feels like God.
Meeting her maker
gives her a jump
on every other person living.
