I hold the feather’s weight of your artery in my pick-ups,
and tiptoe the tightrope about which life and death abuts.

You’re a 2 AM trauma and we still don’t know your name,
the social worker’s thin lips had mouthed: “estranged.”

I read your anatomy like a text as you flat-line:
your hands turn blue as your heart falls still in mine.

The monitor hums "out of time," but by Epinephrine,
and Grace, your chest resumes its rise.

I leave trauma bay in prayer: for the surviving, not the knife;
for the closeness of my hands in your chest, our joining in this life.

Tonight I see you at the Kroger, buying TV dinners and beer.
I hide behind cereal, admiring the life I’d held dear.

But you look so tired, and my heart breaks for how when you died,
I would’ve sold the shoes off my feet to buy you more time.

I wish you knew how precious was each of your heartbeats,
I wish you the wisdom of my view:

How fragile the stent is where your veins meet.