Amy Beth Sisson
DISSECTION

After school
my teacher helped
me pull the pink
downy breast feathers
to clear the skin
and make an incision

She put the scalpel
into my hand
smaller than the body
pinned to the black wax tray
I cut to reveal
porous bones, tiny intestines,
spongy lungs.

This would never
happen now
A teacher today
would lose
her job
Though plenty of robins
are still found dead on sidewalks

Night before last
I didn’t hear
the screech owl
whose cry had
kept me awake
all week

When I awoke
you came to mind out in
the smoke-choked west
Where birds
are falling from the skies
of the migratory flyways
I texted but you still haven’t replied

But today
in the early hours
I again lay listening
for the descending whine
and long trill

Amy Beth Sisson is sheltering in a small town outside of Philly. Her day job is in software development. She tells programmers what business people want and tells business people why they can’t quite have it. She completed UPenn’s online Modern Poetry course, ModPo, this summer.  Her fiction has appeared in Enchanted Conversation and Sweet Tree Review. Her non-fiction for children has appeared in Highlight’s High Five and Fun for Kidz magazines.

Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #32.