Transplant

Your hands seemed always too small

To crush between them

Like indigo dust

The entirety of my heart

Turned to chalk

Yet so you did

A hundred times in preparation

Causing a dysrythmia of fits and starts

As a bullet will pierce and find its worst punctuation

I felt your hands

Reaching inside me and clasping my beating muscle with eagerness

Turn to calcified rock, that which adored you

Just as once you swam within my cove

A lone mermaid, protected by gentle shore and salinity of my devotion

It took too long to become aware

Of that ache and trespass

The stranger in your eyes hurling goodness out the door

An unmade resonance of your own heart

Beating further and further

Away from me like castaway beacon

For something precious, we hardly wish to give up upon

We make excuses for the continued lack

The savage dearticulate rending of gentle emotion

As this grave beseachment, that you stay with me here in this place we created

When you felt the same and held me tighter than hands borne in storm

Will cling to wreckage

I

Never let you go

I

Held on by stitching myself to you

Skin pulling against skin

Submerged and blind I feel for your shape

So dear to me and known over all the world

You who has shucked your hide and flown

As molting cicada will leave behind

Crusty exterior without whole

I was fooled by the echoes of love

And your words you gave, without conviction

I saw in your eyes the truth burning

Indifferent to me and my existence

I was no more to you than

A knot to be undone and placated

I do not know why

You could have brought the knife out and sunk it to the hilt and twisted until

That cry escaped me

as you longing to … will fight the urge to disclose

Your transplant

Why stay and pretend?

Your hands not touching me, hold by your side like wooden plough

Eying furtile crescent of low sheering moon

I am not an earth capable of disgorging life

My land is barren without your kindness

The sun turns me to whitened parchment

I write with scarlet fingers

Of your abandoned nourishment

The ebb and flow before all fluid is lost

No more the cascading ocean

Cresting high with furious need

To hold me once more, horses of foam arching overhead

I ran to the shoreline and saw your sail

Catching first gust and with all mighty exhale

Smile toward the sun, the relief of the free

Unchained from us, I hadn’t known or perhaps refused to own

How you sought your release

Shining like a newly forged key on the operating room of my transplant

No more beating heart

No more the sound of you, rushing in my blood

We amputate pain if we are strong

But I am no warrior

It is the mark of how deeply I felt

I wear my scar

A red ribbon down the middle of my chest

Where you reached, where you existed

Where you left

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