Stemistry lab

Dr Raistrick

Dr Raistrick likes everything to be just so –
a slight twitch in her calf muscle
gives the game away; she wears
Versace slacks with her Jimmy Choos.

Late at night alone in the white room,
she breathes the fragrant avoidance of
Domestos, Obsession. Her lab coat,
washing-ivoried, hangs on a silver
hook on the back of the white door,
faded Quink stain on its breast pocket;
there is a streak of brown blood
on the white tiled floor.

The telephone rings, continues,
there is no answer-machine.
Dr Raistrick doesn’t pick up,
looks at life as a slide
under her microscope:
            fuchsia pink with magenta edge
like a live oyster when you drop lemon in
like being touched inside your skin.

DNA delivers nothing anyway,
but when she studies the wafer
of her own flesh, she knows –
as she fingers her tiny wound,
life-source of this magnified sliver,
beautiful in its deadly dyed form –
she wishes she’d never looked.

Dr Raistrick steps out of her day
clothes, slips into her little black chiffon
and silk frock, the figure-hugging
cocktail dress she never wears for
office parties. She is wearing this
for herself, imagines it in a charity bag,
salvaged as ‘designer’, by a volunteer
who recognises the label.

Late at night in her white lab,
she laughs out loud, the stem-cell
scientist who holds the key to life