Shannon McGarvey

Mary Paterson, 1828

When it was certain that her lungs were empty
and the veins in her wrists were nothing
more than stagnant canals, the murderers folded
her naked body like linen into a tea chest
and dragged it in procession through Edinburgh
to the gates of Surgeons’ Hall.

It was inside, at the sight of her perfect flesh,
Grecian and round in the belly,
still warm and aching with life,
a doctor offered £8 to buy her -
nearly triple what other men paid to bed her.
Perhaps even himself at one time,

Whose postmortem infatuation with Mary
pocketed her dead mother’s pendant and splayed the girl
on the dissection table uncut for two days
while students, some of whom knew her
in shared ways, captured with pen and paint
what nature would soon destroy.

No doubt, in his private moments, the doctor
ran his fingers along the length of her inner thighs,
anatomizing her body without a single incision,
all while the cellular walls of her viscera
crumbled like Jericho and she was born Rahab,
saved not by God but by the holy spirit,

Preserved in whisky for three months
as specimen, taxidermy, lamb to Enlightenment,
the lion of the New Age.

William Burke, 1829

Eight months after he stripped her naked
and stopped her breath with a pillow
Burke hung like a bloated bass
before 25,000 hungry voyeurs.

When the hangman plucked him
from the line, it was said that the crowds
ravaged his body, dug into his flesh
with fingernails, some took knives
to shave the tissue from the tendon,
others ripped souvenirs from his dirty jacket,
until only exposed muscle
and shredded textile remained.

The carcass went to public dissection
in a Danse Macabre of scalpel and skin,
a memento mori to all who watched
the doctors trawl Burke’s purple organs
from the bowl of his torso and fillet
the meat from the bone.

It was rumored that the surgeons
removed his skeleton, as a fisherman would
de-bone the day’s catch – in one connective piece,
his leftovers were thrown to the students as scraps,

His human leather cut and cured,
tanned and stretched into blackened rawhide,
into objets d’art: a pocketbook
in place of a tombstone
with an epitaph in a dull metallic script,
stamped to the scales of the cover
as a timeless warning sign,
“Executed 28 Jan 1829.”

Author Bio
Shannon McGarvey is a writer and poet currently living in New York City. She recently received a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow’s Edwin Morgan Creative Writing program. Individual poems have appeared in Merge Poetry, Haggard and Halloo, Persona, and the two-hour theatrical production ‘The Women of Ill Repute: Refute’. She has received scholarships to the Prague Summer Program Fellowship for poetry writing and the Greta Wrolstad Scholarship for Young Poets to the Summer Literary Series in Russia.