Spoken by Medusahead / The Burlingame Treaty, 1868

On Premier Exhibition’s “BODIES… The Exhibition”

at the Luxor, Las Vegas

Who wouldn’t envy the skinless man?
He holds his flayed hide like a dead enemy.
Bared muscles now gape like lace,
brewed with formalin to fix in place
what’s just for show. Does that loose thing
still stretch—gently air-conditioned—
elastins remembering how to gather
like hands clasped in a prayer?
And if skin is the outermost layer,
then does the condition of skin cover
newly-exposed meat, like the minutes
painting over the past’s witness
with each stroke? And is there a secret
to tricking the eye to misinterpret
a concealed object for its disguises
that I missed? Perhaps what suffices
is keeping hidden what is sealed.
In this exhibit, that means the dead
body must not change. So the body
’s fixed. That’s easy: when in custody
of the exhibit, flesh is dehydrated
in chilled acetone, impregnated
with plastics, hardened into a cure.
Then a living hand seals each contour,
painting veins with the same lapis lazuli
as in Vermeer, the one where sun glistens
on ruddy skin, smoothed over and over
into beauty. I never saw those somber
faces, but my American friend
saw them after their inevitable move
to Las Vegas. Despite their skinlessness,
I recognized that they were Chinese,
he said. But you had said no Chinese
would sell their body for a show. These
must have been prisoners, the executed,
sold without consent or even names

1. At this point in our conversation, I felt a sudden stitch of fear.
   
2. I was becoming one with those dead things.
   
3. When America recedes from that air-conditioned hall,
   I would stay behind, pricked out of its masses,
   sewn to these strangers.
   
4. I look at the bodies. My brethren.
   
5. Paint sheen, hardened muscle, a lode of polymers
   curled around each organ, glamorous, shiny, stiff,
   almost universalized by skinlessness.
   
6. You are here, I think, because bodies like ours
   are cheap.
   
7. Their lips (still extant) pucker as if embarrassed
   above the Greek arrangements, the lungs,
   the anonymous hearts, the dumb bones.
   
8. But bone, more than face, holds onto origins.
   
9. Bones store isotopes that mutter where
   water had scraped mineral from streambanks
   into body, a hard citizenry that even
   
10. this far away, is memorized like a name.
    
11. If I were to index their isotopes against mine,
    mine would translate as another land’s.
    
12. By bone-language, I am distant. I am their foreigner.
    
13. The stitch of fear is gone but I grip its rope.
    
14. I pull step by step, I count backwards,
    
15. I use the half-prose of my analytics, my
    
16. body in the company of these bodies—purchased
    to perform the contrapposto, the chase, nude fibrils
    posing with perfect calm, the sports star,
    
17. the angel, the prophet
    
18. Habakkuk in half-shout from his marble shelf—
    
19. until I can almost, on the floor in the hall, hear:
    
20. the doors clang shut, again and again.
     

Angelo Mao is a biomedical scientist and the author of Abattoir (Burnside Review Press, 2021). His poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Annulet, The Drift, Oversound, AGNI, and elsewhere. He is managing editor of DIALOGIST.