This Random Heart
- This Random Heart
… muscular, cone-shaped organ, about the size of a clenched fist
Our palms up, open to receive this randomheart, so severely severed fromits host, now released from its cageof ribs, combed out of the meshed net ofpericardium, our Body Worlds Guide pressesit into our hands, demands we weigh it simultaneously.
Once vivid, oxygen-rich, a bifurcatedaorta racing with scarlet bliss, now the chemicalcolor of Silly Putty. It’s a clichéthe size of my fist. Four chambers dippedin some polymer patented Plasticene.Unable to murmur secrets through the stethoscope’sdiaphragm into her doctor’s ear.
The guide can’t narrate any biographicaldetails involving donors yet I dwellin details. Was her heart amply stockedwith love? Did fear slosh up, backflowher valves? Did her children make greatweighty demands? Did they eat her heart out?
My husband and I exchange glances. We’re dumbstruck, unable to explain our own skipped beats forfirst lust, the race up flights of orgasmic stairs.Before I hand it back to our guide I want to bringit to my face and smell some urgent stinkof heart break. I want to tossthis heart back and forth like a hot potatothen shake it to see if a tiny packet of desiccantrattles inside like regret. [End Page 24]
Jenna Rindo worked as a pediatric intensive care nurse in hospitals in Virginia, Florida, and Wisconsin, and now teaches English to non-native speakers. Her poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review, Shenandoah, American Journal of Nursing, Ars Medica, Bellingham Review, Calyx, Poems Memoir Story, and other journals. She lives with her husband Ron and children in rural Wisconsin where they raise fruit trees, chickens, and a small flock of Shetland sheep.
