Dead Weight Raven Leilani (bio) My mother spends an hour easing the chest open, depositing jaundiced pieces of lung into cloudy glasses of formalin. She tilts her head and smiles, tongue pressed into the gap in her teeth. A spongy layer of yellow fat, flush against slack purple muscle, a freckled lung—after death, all organs become indiscreet. They betray the clear, scentless liquors, the furious clockwork of cigarettes. When the liver comes out, it is heavy and fried. Because my mother works at the VA, her subjects tend to be male. Old soldiers without families. Like my father. This is the first time a body has been female, and after the chest cavity is smooth, she breaches the pelvis and sighs. A hysterectomy. She opens it up and asks me to notice what is not there. But all I can think about is the metallic, fecal smell. The accumulation of waste around the cadaver’s thighs and feet. The curt, penciled script that says, seventy-two, white, cirrhotic. I am two months out of high school, and when the residents lead me down into the morgue, they ask which medical school I want to attend. I don’t have the heart to tell them that I will study literature at a small college upstate. As the fluids drain, it feels too frivolous to say. ________ At my age, my mother was thin and high with two young sons. Riding the train to keep warm at night, Bayridge to Jamaica Queens. In the rehabilitation center, they made her wear all white and re-enact her birth. With me, my mother did everything differently. She took me to church, and then at home we talked about alkaloids uncoupling from their salt, the lattice in the freebase, pooling on a spoon. She didn’t leave anything out: Her knees buckling in Bed-Stuy. The cherry lodged between pink halves of brain, seeking rupture in that perfect, prototypical high. She was especially frank about sex, determined that I have the vocabulary to know what is mine. I became more straight-laced than she planned. I wore baggy clothes, refused her attempts to throw birthday parties. I called family meetings to talk about how we could better keep the sabbath. I was ambivalent about boys, but passionate about my comics and all the iterations of Robin—Dick, the circus orphan; Jason, the one the Joker turned inside out; and Stephanie, the Robin with tits. When I received my first bad grade, she held the report card to the light and said, honestly, I’m relieved. In our small Bronx apartment, we shared socks and slept in the same bed. [End Page 142] She sewed our dress clothes—gloves, skirts, and headscarves from kente and ukara—sheaves of African textiles draped over her shoulders and arms. On Fridays, we followed the sun’s arc through the sky. We welcomed the sabbath, forgave the light pollution and watery dusk. She was dark and cool and preposterous in church clothes, and I was territorial, disturbed by how men exerted themselves to look at her. She kept a secret smile behind her hand during tithe. Because everywhere we went, men were looking. To her, it was just a matter of course. But I hated the idea that one day it might happen to me. ________ When I was seven, she met my stepfather. It was their second meeting, actually, a chance encounter in Crown Heights. When they first met a few decades earlier, the timing was wrong. She was seventeen and he was forty-one. She slipped into a bar where he was smoking and drinking and married. She pulled him onto the dance floor, and when he smiled, the fillings in his teeth were gold. She introduced him to me with this seventeen-year-old giddiness. I knew enough about sex to tell him what his aged genitals were not permitted to do. Still, he wore a powder blue suit the day they stood before the justice of the peace. She wanted me to have a father. He wanted a third wife. His first two wives were dead, and my mother was a year into her...