No picnic cooler look-alike, the kind
transporting a dead man’s heart
to my father in ’93 after his thirty
years of near-death when
the blizzard-driving really-
dead anonymous donor
said Yes to a life not his. No,
today’s latest medical advance
keeps the dead’s bloody
valentine pa-pa-pumming
all the way to the sterile
stretched-out-on-the-table almost-
corpse, knocked out while the crying
bystanders pray for mercy, for miracles,
and outside in the real bloody
world of Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights,
Dallas, my town/yours,
no heart pa-pa-pums
in Alton, Philandro, Lorne, Michael,
Brent, Patrick, Michael J.,
while waiting bystanders pray
for “advances” and “miracles.”
And no heart pa-pa-pums in the dead-
silence of the dug-up ground
where they’ll be transplanted,
bloody organs in another box,
because some said No
to a life not theirs,
while others—between the beats
and the beatings, the rat-a-tat-tats,
and the pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pums—
tried to say Yes.