The women in my family have strong stomachs 

and weak hearts. Can wipe pus and blood 

and feces, clean soiled sheets and trousers, 

shave sunken jowls, clip calloused toenails 

without vomiting, with rarely a cringe. We have 

watched men rot like spoiled tomatoes, sinking 

into their own soft, black spots; held their bloated 

purpled heads and mulled them over, clinically,

like science projects. In seventh grade, 

I sliced the pale, silk stomach of a pinned frog, 

found and labeled the heart as my lab partner gagged. 

I marveled at grandmother’s lucid mind, 

shaky hands and daily bourbon, 

while the gasless engine of her body gently eased to a stop; 

mother’s thickening arteries, despite perpetual motion. 

My own chest, tightens with each new grief,

a densely muscled hollow filled with fluid loneliness.