Justin Groppuso-Cook

Luminous Viscera: Oil on Canvas

for Joe Groppuso 

What ails me: 

such heartache 

            swept in his canopic chest, 

these chambers 

            a void. His masterpiece 

                        looming 

            in our living room. 

Gold leaf lines the edges, 

            his strokes of alabaster jars: 

Imsety, human-headed, 

            his liver of bourbon; 

Qebehsenuef, falcon-headed, 

            intestines of blackening tar; 

Hapi, baboon-headed, lungs 

            of smoke; 

Duamutef, jackal-headed, blossoming 

            poppies in his gut. 

Ancient Egyptians left the heart 

            in the sarcophagus— 

necessary for safe passage. 

            But doctors cut forth his 

in the night, scalpel like a brush 

            blending burgundy 

to black. Replaced his valves with that 

            of a pig—heavy, 

                        I wept. 

I transplant myself into his rib 

            cage: the frame 

                        fractured. 

Seep into the cracks, the foreground 

            weeping with varnish— 

I have nothing to give, not even my own 

            to weigh upon the scales 

of the afterlife. I bear with the dead, 

            befriend them, bare all. 

My lighthearted sacrifice: a brushstroke 

            that overturns the feather.  

Veins flood as I uphold his body 

            & carry us through the reeds.