Open Heart Surgery On My Father

Norene Cashen
Published on December 6, 2018

(after John Rybicki) 

My whole life I’ve played
a silver instrument, a hand-me-down
scalpel with a checkered handle 
that really belongs on a pistol. 

My whole damn life I’ve said 
if only he were a different man 
with different eyes and different ideas 
I might have had a chance. 

But when they wheel him in on the gurney
sheets the color of ocean at dusk 
and ask me to save him, I have to say yes. 

With my mouth I say yes. With my blade 
I say yes, and starting at the top 
of his sternum I cut my father open. 

As I run the red line to his belly 
I think maybe I’ll finally see 
the contents of this man 
who’s lived a life as secret as a vault 
inside a vault. 

I’m the expert, the great trespasser of blood,
and no incision has ever been made so straight. 

The ribs swing open like haunted doors, 
the corridor of his body sings darkly,
and somewhere inside him I hear my own voice. 

My father’s heart is filled with mistakes
knotted veins of untold love,
and I’m not sure which wire to cut 
to untangle them. 
 

Genre: 
Poetry
Author Bio: 

Norene Cashen is a writer who lives and works in Michigan. She's served as a writer in residence and the coordinator for Detroit's award-winning youth poetry slam team through InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Dispatch Detroit, Adanna, Detroit Stories (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit), The Collagist, Temenos, markszine.com, and the anthologies Abandon Automobile (Wayne State University Press) and Uncommon Core (Red Beard Press). Her essays, reviews and articles have appeared in Detroit's Metro Times, Jacket, Orlando Weekly, Teachers and Writers Magazine, C-Magazine, and the anthology To Light a Fire (Wayne State University Press). Her book of poems, The Reverse Is also True, was published by Doorjamb Press and re-released as part of the Dzanc Books rEprint series. 

Issue: 
62