Open Your Heart

Step 1: Do not read the instructions
Someone will have read them for you—
a do-gooder who Googled it at 2am
and carries the diagrams now
behind their eyes.

They will bring it up.
Shut them down.

You need only the bird’s-eye view:
open, fix, close.
This is the maximum amount of knowing
you can afford
or you will not walk through this door.

Step 2: The saw
Think of a tiger prawn on paella night.
Thumb along the spine,
blade to split the shell.

It’s that,
but the prawn is your sternum,
the blade an oscillating saw,
and the paella is not going well.

The parts they need sit at the core.
To reach them, everything
must be parted, held wide—
the way you’d part a curtain
to see what the noise was.

Don’t worry.
A box will pump your blood
while the heart is stopped.
The box does not have opinions.
The box just pumps.
You might be technically dead.

Step 3: Time travel
You surface. It is Thursday.
It was Thursday when you went under,
ergo, it is Thursday.

A nurse says Saturday.
This is obviously wrong.
You were here a moment ago
counting backwards from ten
and now here again, mouth full of tube,
chest full of weather.
No time has passed.
Saturday is a clerical error.

They produce a clock. Irrelevant.
A window. Proves nothing.
A phone, finally, its date
glowing like a small verdict,
and you concede—
not because you feel it
but because it seems rude to argue
with a screen.

Two days have happened to your body
that did not happen to you.
Your sternum knows things
your mind was not invited to.

Step 4: The jacket
They fit you with a vest,
tight as a life jacket,
which is funny, because it is one.

It holds the sternum tight
the way a hand holds a cracked egg.

You will wear it sleeping.
You will learn to hate it
and to fear the hour it comes off.

Getting out of bed is a technique now.
Cross your arms over your chest,
the way they’d lay you out if this had gone the other way.
Roll to the side, drop the legs,
and sit up using nothing
that remembers the saw.

Get it wrong and a white pain
empties your lungs of every word you own.
You will get it wrong.

No kettle for twelve weeks.
A bag of sugar will defeat you.
A jug of water: unthinkable.

Someone will butter your toast
and you will let them,
and this—not the saw,
not the stopped heart,
not the two lost days—
this will be the thing
that tells you what has happened.