M Cynthia Cheung

Two-Headed Dog

Moscow is huge city where hundreds of people die daily from various causes;
we shall take what we need from the dead in order to save the living.
—Dr. Vladimir Demikhov, father of transplant surgery, 1959

1.
Brodyaga means “tramp,”
meaning this big young bitch
was plucked from the streets. Shavka—
“mongrel”—is self-explanatory.

2.
The doctor clarifies how lucky
they are: Two heads are better
than one. Small bright Shavka lolls 

her tongue, jumps and smiles. Brodyaga’s
already sedated—hard to picture her wolf-like
form roaming the streets.
The surgery itself takes less

than two hours. Anesthetize, shave.
Open the larger dog’s nape, cut through
to the spine. Ensure the host wound

is large. Now the graft: open the little dog’s
chest and neck. Dissect down. Vessel
by vessel, isolate the heart
from its head, and, with each suture, join

that head to the vast, waiting wound.
To free the graft, slice away the rest
of Shavka. 

3.
Now, what can the heads do?
The doctor shows each one blinking
and—when the narcosis has worn off—
eating, lapping water. 

The graft head has no stomach;
what it drinks spills from a tube
onto the floor.

4.
After surgery, instruments are sterilized,
the furnace turned on. The amputated body
of what was this morning a barking dog
drifts into the sky. 

In the yard, the host finally stands,
gold-black tail shivering, clamped tight.

The heads tremble.

________________________________________________________________________________________

M Cynthia Cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books, 2025). Her poems can be found in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades and swamp pink, among others. She is a prior Idyllwild Arts Writers Week fellow and serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Award. She practices internal medicine in Texas. Find out more at www.mcynthiacheung.com.