Forensics

Forensics

Shall we do an autopsy

on the thing that’s dead between us? 

Shall we look at the floor and say,

“The directionality of the blood splatter

is consistent with arterial spray?”

Which of us will play the coroner 

in this cold case reconstruction?

I say I have determined

the cause of death to be asphyxia.

The victim was burked, killed the way a lion 
sometimes smothers a buffalo, 

by clamping its jaws over the muzzle,

replacing breath for breath. I can tell

by the swollen heart, the eyes and lungs,

where the petechial hemorrhaging shows

all the hypoxic arguments ended in

our fingers breaking the hyoid bone, closing

the muzzle, crushing the words.You say 

it's plain by the rosy pink of the lividity

that the body has been subjected to

prolonged, intense cold. Decomp's begun;

the tissues begin to fail, the cornea dulls

so that looking at each other, no ectoplasmic

bridge springs up, nothing of affinity in eyes 

dead red, sightless wide. We've come
to the limit of forensics. No chromatography,

no strike of a DNA match

can light up this black puzzle.

June 2011

Posted for OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

“...The term "burking" comes from the method William Burke and William Hare used to kill their victims during the West Port murders. They killed the usually-intoxicated victims by sitting on their chests and suffocating them by putting a hand over their nose and mouth, while using the other hand to push the victim's jaw up. The corpses had no visible injuries, and were supplied to medical schools for money.”

~ enotes.com/forensic-science/

Image courtesy google image search, no credits available, originating site