Microglia Isolation

I freeze the mouse pups
on dry ice. They are
one day old, can’t see the room,
and me wrapping them in foil.
When they stop moving,
I snip their heads off.
They feel it
for only an instant.
I isolate the brain cortex and the hypothalamus
And discard the rest of the brain.
I tell myself it was okay to take the pups
From their mother. I’ve seen them kill their babies.
Mice make bad mothers.
I bred these mice
in a clean and controlled
mouse room, in the basement
of a research institution.
I made them for the lab. I choose
when they die. I could not look
at the first mouse I killed,
sacrificed for science.
My hands shook as I dislocated
its neck, less stressful for the adult mouse
than euthanasia. The pups, frozen in foil,
are easier to kill.
They don’t need to be restrained.
Their death
is a relief.

◆

Genotyping

The adult mice are harder to keep down.
This one is round in the palm of my right hand.

I cut the tip of the tail and the mouse escapes, but it’s bleeding,
its tail spreading blood in its cage, marking the transparent walls

with thin lines of red like a child with a crayon.
I catch it again and wipe its tail then burn it lightly

to stop the bleeding. I know I waited too long
to cut its tail. I should have done it weeks ago.

I’m leering above the mouse, apologizing. The room
smells of urine, food pellets,

and the burning of a tail. I smell like fear, the mouse knows that.
Back in the lab, when I run its DNA on a gel,

I add its genotype to my folder with the hundreds of others.
The mouse is wild-type. I don’t need it anymore.