Organ Donor
I regrow my heart every day to have it severed for strangers
who study it from a distance,
weighing it on a scale,
reading lines of poetry scrawled across arteries and veins,
words like “don’t cry for the chrysalis,
it is proud of you from a distance,”
or,
“it is freeing to fly, even if you don’t know where to land just yet,”
to have them discarded like chopped liver,
leaving behind a black hole that eclipses with beating flesh,
a new heart to be measured
as an ornate, dissociated muscle,
and not the vessel that carried ache till the end,
like “cavernous souls have the loudest hearts.”
The heart is quiet, wearing what it is stained with,
dip into the inkwell,
breathe the iron to understand
that my ache is good too,
this heart has been submitted for a reason,
because I thought our scars complimented each other,
please take it,
I know I can’t bear it anymore,
but can you find a way to, just this once?
*
Submitting to poetry magazines is like offering your heart in some ways. You have to prep your heart, or poetry, for surgery, you ache waiting for a response (post op), you try to keep your mind off of things, and when your “heart” is rejected, it hurts that the stitches must be undone, the draft edited, and the process to begin again.
With that being said, it is cathartic to send your pieces out. You are seen, considered, and if you are accepted, you are regarded for your work. The time to track down the roots of emotions, researching the right words, and trading synonyms is a game of risk; will they like it? Will they understand it?
If they don’t, there is a lesson there. What can I do to strengthen this piece? How much more time does this work need to be ready? Sometimes it does take a few “regenerations” to be picked up, and that is okay.
That’s the beauty of poetry, of art overall, the trials and tribulations, the metaphors, the patience, the praying, the stories shared by others who see themselves in your work.