If you're alone in the kitchen and drop the lamb, you can always just pick it up. Who's going to know it?-Julia Child

Imagine a neurosurgeon in scrubs
hunched over a dead man's chart

writing loops and strands of
     twisted prose

illegible as pasta
      lying on a plate.

Imagine the quick snip of day-old
      sutures,
a scalpel slicing a crust of blood,

the careful retraction of scalp and
      brain
to retrieve a wad of gauze

left behind like yesterday's paper
on the back seat of a bus.

And imagine the patient's
      brain stem
herniating through the foramen
      magnum