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Tissue Culture

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Some hearts dissolve in one day.

Their many families of cells live on

inside incubators.

Myocytes growing in petri dishes through winter.

Invisible scaffolding guides their migrations,

nomads searching once again for each other.

They do not forget where they come from.

When they meet, they join,

beating in unison.

 

The student checks their pulse

at noon and at midnight,

notes changes in morphology,

new cell-cell contacts.

He does not notice

the sugar ant

dragging a black hair

into the crack in the floor.

Who knows how far back down.

 

Food for the Queen.

Or maybe digested into glue

to plug a growing void in the wall.

Or to tie our breath

to the other side of the wind.

 

 

 

 

 

© Robert S. Pesich, all rights reserved. This poem first appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Vol.13 No.2, Fall, 2007