Tanner Stening

Broken Heart Syndrome

The evidence is in. The human heart breaks
and it is the body that breaks it.

Push on the surgical scar and the walls cave in.
You topple preciously in on yourself, 

down the well your vanishing makes, 
armor clanking. This mess of organs. Just like that. 

No longer a person, you’ll be inoperable. You’ll locate
the stars, their constancy filling in where your body once rested,

trading carbon and water and heat 
for mere subsistence, these sweet human burdens. 

No more tension headaches; no more heart medication.
The unexplained bruises will vanish, too. Just like that.

Your eyes, two frothing, pine-colored orbs,
no longer able to probe the dark room of my mind.

Now the health of your kidneys and liver will determine
what kind of dust you’ll become, how the winds

will distribute you across this vast living plane
until what tugs incessantly in me 

about you reaches, finally, a net-zero. 
Until then, our work is that of survival,

of living in the meanwhile,
for the sudden explosion of 

aberrant cells, for someone to take us 
by the hand and lead us into the examination room.

O Mother of Rose, I’ll have them prepare 
your scans with the correct family name this time.   

I’ll scoop out the excess water on your heart
using only this small pail.

Tanner Stening is a poet and journalist based in Boston. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Chicago Review, The Drift, Annulet, The Adroit Journal, Rattle, New York Quarterly, Portrait of New England, and elsewhere.