Electrocardiogram | Finger in the Operating Room

Electrocardiogram

My back aches.

Three months ago they cut out my heart

and planted in in my spine

next to the thirteenth vertebra.

Now my life hangs by a thin vein

that pumps blood from that dark cavity into my new heart—

a stupid blue-black vein,

and a heart like a roving whore.

Nowadays I get the news from my heart monitor,

all the headlines are about the past:

a woman who used to laugh,

a man I once loved,

tapped phones

and extravagantly healthy hearts.

The heart is a window

facing exile, endless wandering.

This lump of red muscle,

I wish it were a mirror

facing the present.

The doctor flashes his friendly smile:

“We just had to move it about a little;

now you could set a watch by your heartbeat!”

Watches, their rotten alarms…

Last night my latest lover asked:

Do you think we’re being watched?

I thought he was testing the extent of my insanity,

so I hid the stubborn shadows from him.

All these years I’ve hidden the shadows’ eyes inside my shirts.

The last shadow was running city to city

with a bloody heart in its fist.

Doctors are the enemies of shadows,

and experts in diagnosing paranoia.

They know what to prescribe for exile:

heart relocation,

for times when a heart is too scarred to heal.

Finger in the Operating Room

In the operating room:

Translucent images of bones chained together from every angle: profile, half-profile, three-quarters profile, elongated beyond reality. Their outlines unrecognizable, they crouch as if to avoid the camera’s gaze.

In their hunt for obstinate shards of glass, surgeons decapitate the lines that once formed a fingerprint, and I’m thinking of the last border checkpoint my fingerprint triumphed over. What will life look like with a mess of decapitated lines for a fingerprint?

What good are stamped dates and memories when I cannot touch them? I have to change position. It’s impossible to write steadily from this angle with this unfeeling mass of stitches that barely hold skin and flesh together.

My fingers have gone to sleep. Under the surgeon’s scalpel my hand is dreaming.

In recovery:

The long, wide lights force my eyes open. I’m trying to make the nurse understand: I haven’t forgotten my name. English slips and slides and spills from my mouth like a child wetting herself from fear. I tell the nurse: stitches are like clichés, both join one emptiness to another.

She asks my name again. I tell her we’ve all become tongue-tied: my finger, the x-ray, the stitches, the border police, the fingerprint scanner. Then I repeat my name and lift my right hand.

Light reflecting off the white bandage almost blinds me. Everything is normal. My finger is where it always was.

Image by Thomas Colligan.