My father was never properly buried
	because he donated his body to science.
I did not check the box, Return of Ashes—
	not from negligence, but a defiance
of what mourning I could have done.
	Some med-student in a lab cut him apart
by the book, shucking the bones
	of muscle and squeezing the depleted heart.
Good fathers gift their sons lessons in care—
sons become fathers soon enough to share
their body language, their life after death.
	I purchase a plain plot on the graveyard’s view,
to place a cenotaph of quarried gray there
	and sign my own intent as I am inspired to do.