PATRICIA ZYLIUS

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I Dream I Have Heart Surgery​​

No operating theater, no surgeon. Just me 

standing in my dusty living room, 

among furniture and photos of the grandchildren 

I will not see. Three soft lumps of muscle glisten 

in my cupped hands, wet and slippery, 

bright and red as huge cherries brought in 

from a kind rain — it’s my heart I hold, 

blood vessels still attached. The pieces 

slide against each other as I roll them 

over and over, looking for the missing 

chamber. It’s simply not there. 

Yet when the blessed thing is put back in — 

the dream leaves this part out — I live. 

Almost happy.

Patricia Zylius is the author of the chapbook Once a Vibrant Field. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, SWWIM, Plant-Human Quarterly, Quartet, Catamaran Literary Reader, The Journal of Radical Wonder, Crosswinds, Body, Gyroscope Review, Passager, Sequestrum, Book of Matches, Juniper, Gingerbread House, Willows Wept, and other journals, on the Women’s Voices for Change website, and in a few anthologies. She lives in Santa Cruz, California, with her husband and an assortment of spiders.

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