The Heart You Were Born With

I will steady
your heart with the rod.
Ripe as mold and with roots
hanging out the bottom of its own
tingly fist.  Its arrhythmia full
of white knuckled raps
through the stethoscope.

You have spent years
sitting in chairs with your breastbone
skinned, up to your neck in missing ribs.
I paint the heart you were born with
on a tin plate stuck beneath the gutter
of your clavicle. I can’t touch
the crosshairs: a swimm-
ing eel of wires whose skin cracks
like a whip, then disappears
into a defibrillator.

There is nothing
that stops your heart cold
like the onset of silence in the barrel
of your chest, or the gulp of air
that swallows your kneecaps.

I will wipe your brow,
and paint the electric shock
to your heart
to look like you: unafraid;
smoldering with plasma,
the four walls anchored to a sea
floor of cadence.
A clutch of arteries snake-dancing
on the gritty scalp of Medusa.

.

Written with images of “The Two Fridas” swimming through my head.

holly hinkle