Billie Sainwood

The Parts Before Frankenstein

CW: gore, blood, death

Before the doctor and Igor and the shovels
before lightning kissed the body twitching and alive...

The arms belonged to a boy who held a bouquet of flowers.
The arms shook nervously towards a woman the boy loved,
Until suddenly, a storm of bad neurons and blood
burst through the boy’s brain and the arms went limp
and the flowers scattered like a gust of color
and the boy fell with just enough life in him to see the woman
and think
Look at me.

The legs held up a woman
who turned a cliffside into a citadel
and their eyes into spy glasses that scanned the horizon
for any sign of the ship that sailed away with the woman she loved
before she could tell her.
The legs supported the woman, a quiet, weeping statue
until the rain swallowed her lungs like a cold ocean
and she shivered
and froze.

The torso and its ripe basket of organs
bounced inside a man in a mail coach.
who spent years delivering letters
and stopping to look at the one man on the mail route
with blue eyes that ripped through him like bullets of frost.

Every day, the driver wrote his feelings into a letter
dropped it off in the blue eyed man’s mailbox
and every night since went back to get it
before it was discovered.
Every route like this until a faulty wheel and too much speed
crashed the coach off the road
and splashed the driver into the street
and spilled his brains into the mud
like so many letters from a sack.
For a week no one got their mail.
For his whole life, the blue eyed man would never know.

The brain used to spark and ripple
in the skull of a thief
who memorized safe combinations and patrol routes
who Hoped all their work it would add up to enough
to woo the one they loved away from their high society spouse
until the law settled their debt with the snap of a rope.
In the crowd at their hanging, their lover sighed
and went back to their tea.

Different body parts, the doctor said,
brought together by lightning and sutures.
with nothing in common but his own ambition,

But he could not know.
Each one died alone.
Each one died afraid.
Each one died with longing and with love unrequited.

Until they all woke up
felt a stranger’s arms
leaned on a stranger’s legs,
thumped their terrors through a stranger’s heart
and thought, with a stranger’s brain,

How lovely it is
to be together.