Tibia.
From Greek—reed pipe.
Gracilis.
From Latin—slender.
Sartorius.
From Latin—tailor.
Literally, sartorius is the muscle that tailors needed so they could cross one ankle over the opposite knee in order to spread out fabric in front of them and sew.
We love someone who admires and plays with anatomical words and digs deep into their etymology as much as we do. Well, as much as we hope we do.
Recently we had a chance to hear Alyse Knorr read her poem “Cadaver Day.” She had been invited to teach at a small writers’ conference in southwest Colorado and we heard her read the poem aloud.
We were instantly transfixed, particularly as the poem contrasts cadaver dissection with other forms of learning anatomy and as it references a host of anatomical terms including piriformus, patella, and navicular too.
Alyse Knorr has a stellar career in the world of letters, so it’s no surprise the poem captured us the way it did. She’s an associate professor of English at Regis University, co-editor of Switchback Books, and co-producer of the Sweetbitter podcast. She is the author of the poetry collections Ardor (2023), Mega-City Redux (2017), Copper Mother (2016) and Annotated Glass (2013).
She also authored the video game history books GoldenEye (2022) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (2016); and four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, POETRY Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.
“Cadaver Day,” in fact, is from the publication Ardor (Gasher Press).
So here’s something a little different on the blog this time—poetry! And one we found that you find to be as fascinating, inspiring, and intriguing as we did.
Cadaver Day
By Alyse Knorr
When they arrive pale-faced and woozy to my lit class
I will read my nursing students Keats. And they will think
only of the vastus medialis and the rectus femoris, and how
they looked not strong and red as on the plastic model
but pale and shriveled, spoiled like old meat. They will think
of the sound of their blade slicing into the corpse’s leg,
of the tibial nerve running along and taut like a highway
straight down to the ankle, of the precarity of their bodies
made only of body. I will tell them that Keats trained
as a surgeon before offering himself to poetry, that he died
just a few years older than them. But their mind will stay lost
in the length of a leg on the table: how the toes wriggled
with the tug on the ribboned tendons, how the toes had nails,
how the nails once grew, how an old woman with a name
once bent to trim them over a toilet bowl. Beauty is truth
and truth is beauty, but a body on a table is made of parts
with names like tibia, soleus, gracilis: words that once meant
flute, soil, and slender, the fragility of grace. Plantaris
the young tree, sartorius the mender. Names to be tested
and known as certainly as Adam knew the names of the animals,
or at least as I know of my own. This body whose name I live in,
splayed on the table so I can teach again in death. But that
is not for today. Today is not Cadaver Day. Today is for
replica models that snap together like toys. Today they color
the arteries red and the veins blue, dreaming of their scrubs
and their stethoscopes, strangers to Keats and the plague
they'll soon battle. Today the answer is not, Someone once kissed
this spot, so tender behind the knee, but piriformus, patella, navicular.
A pear and a saucer. A ship treading out to sea.
Note: "Cadaver Day" was published in Ardor, from Gasher Press (2023). It was first published in The Southern Review, then in Poetry Daily, as a slightly different version and under the title "Anatomy Exam."
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