a thing you can do that's very helpful is just edit in your revision to the first post, spoilering previous drafts like so:
(remove the periods) [.pre verse]like so[./pre verse]
also you can edit the title of the thread to better indicate when you've edited.
but back to the poem.
taking this first as the description to a literal dissection, this is pretty....weirdly....done. and this i say as someone who has performed plenty of dissections...
first, it has to be made clear just what kind of dissection this is. is it investigative, like your typical autopsy, or is it instructive, as in the sort that college students do?
assuming this is an autopsy, "knives" should come in much later, considering "skull / lumpy / or a finger / too long" and "x-ray flash". the first thing is to examine the body's outside thoroughly, recording any unusual features of the skin and the general morphology, then to photograph the insides via x-ray and other like instruments. only afterwards does one "slip away [the] skin"...but you do that AFTER you "protect yourself / with latex".
then, autopsy or otherwise, one typically begins with the viscera -- one cuts from the collarbones to the pelvis -- rather than goes around the head or legs. the "heart" comes much earlier than the "mouth" or the "legs".
the resource i'm looking at does mention looking at tissues under the microscope before cutting open the skull, but i presume the employment of stains is more typically done last, with all necessary samples being collected in a continuous go.
and then, in the end, the body is stitched closed...although that was something the courses i took didn't practice, since we never handled humans.
the instructions, if they're meant to be arranged chronologically, are a
mess, and so they would read incompetent or incoherent. if they're meant to read topologically -- we start from the head down, the toes up, etc. -- again, they're a mess.
if they're meant to read sexually, as i most readily presume they are, they read somewhat....alien. either there's a lot of mixed metaphors going on, starting with the metaphorical "knife" to the heart then going to the literal "position the legs" and "protect yourself", or maybe that more literal interval leading up to "separate the heart / with wires" is a depiction of the sort of interval one sees between a couple that's really going at it, or maybe even the speaker is just that messed up in choosing to open with such a fatal paraphilia. really, if you were trying to go for either of my latter two guesses, then the first guess still applies, since the metaphors all seem kinda jumbled up. for another example, "separate the heart / with wires / from the chamber / to the cell", at its more literal level, links up two orders of magnitude about the physical heart, the visible-with-the-naked-eye chamber and the microscopic cell, and really, cells
already separate between the heart's chambers....
a much better go at it would be to make it a coherent description of an autopsy, either chronologically or topologically, or else just make the basis of the piece a literal description of a sexual encounter -- vague emotions, then paraphilias, then paraphilias+touching, then full blown sex, and so on -- peppered, in the more usual manner, with one's clinical metaphors. going with just what's been written:
Protect yourself
with latex.
Is the skull
lumpy---
Open the mouth,
put a finger here,
---or a finger
too long?
there,
position the legs.
An x-ray flash.
Compare. Contrast.
I invite knives,
so curious a thing.
Make a slit,
slide away skin.
Cut a flap,
expose the insides.
Separate the heart
with wires,
fix the brain,
exhibit
with your stain
an example.
one line in that hypothetical revision i've removed, and one i suggest be removed generally, is "must be dissected?": considering all this talk of knives and viscera, i find it completely unnecessary. similarly, the title is just....too on the nose....highlighting what may be a larger problem with this piece.
as it stands, if this is supposed to be a "queer" piece, i just find it too....sensationalist? melodramatic? without effectively conveying just
why it should be so sensational or dramatic, whether a specific moment of heartbreak/bigotry or an overall political/philosophical mood. other than "how interesting" and a general sense of violence, i don't really know where the speaker is coming from, and this i say as a queer person, albeit one who admits they haven't read as much queer poetry as they would like.
still, compare this to basically any poem expressing longing, or maybe to the (sparse, but still effective) lyrics of sophie's
oil of every pearl's un-insides. especially the latter (for me, at least---again, my horizons are just not broad enough), where there is a lot of violence, if not in the words then in the sounds by which they are conveyed, and yet i have a greater sense there of just what the violence really entails, of just what kind of queer the speaker is (trans woman whose theory of transness seems to be rooted in the idea of an immaterial self, also 100% a bottom) and just what sort of hostility she experiences in the world (the sort of hostility that forces her to out herself as a trans woman, or at least to go for photoshop alongside plastic surgery).
this may be more effective if you just polished the conceit you already have -- the dissection -- and let the "highness" flow from there. at the very least, i
like the chamber/cell double meaning, but again, that only works if both meanings were coherent: if, for instance, you had it so that the chambers -- the bedrooms -- were already separated or even defined by cells -- prison cells -- as they actually, literally are for the heart.
