Grey's Anatomy feels like my life turned satire.
I respect the systemic wounds opened to air
between the "pick me" lines,
but the trauma tropes stack so high
they topple over and kill off another main character.
Surgeons have all the maturity
of my teenage daughter in scrubs.
Icicles, plane crashes and bombs
are the hypotenuse of love triangles.
In one episode, Meredith Grey
fixates on a pair of shoes
worn by a woman who's been raped.
I turn my nose up at the easy parallel we draw
to someone else's very real pain.
I still binge-watch the medical show.
Biology is a sexy spectacle,
like the poem stuck in my head:
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
trying to marry science to religion
and learning one eats the other
like a vanishing twin.
Dissect the pig. Peel back ribs
until you can see the heart.
I understand wanting that kind of clarity.
I've dissected a fetal pig once, too.
Those same cinderblock labs know the scuffs on my shoes.
Criminal Justice 101 discussed vehicles as weapons.
Responses ranged from "shoot the tires"
to full action-movie reenactments.
The former police chief teaching at ODU had only one word: move.
Don't let a vehicle trap your ego.
But now there are nameless agents in masks
"Get out the car!"
"Get out of here!"
"Open the door!"
three voices shouting on Portland Avenue
three bullets to the head—not the tercet
or the pentameter you wrote about.
With aim that precise, the agent chose not to move aside.
Lactic acid is just a byproduct in the lab
but in a living body it burns under stress.
There are some things
you're not supposed to say out loud,
like that we share a middle name
and a school, that our children know the grief
of losing a parent, that I'm thirty-three today
crying on my birthday for someone I've never met
someone they've labeled a domestic terrorist,
and I realize I'm obsessed
that you wear my shoes.
Ashley Nicole Nootnagel lives in Virginia and has a B.S. in Criminal Justice & Sociology from Old Dominion University. She works in human resources and is raising a daughter and two Australian Shepherds.
