EXPERIMENT

December 08, 2018 / John Grimmett

I heard on the radio
that baboons in Germany
were given pig hearts
to see if they could sustain,
blocking certain enzymes
(the usual and the sort)
and I really stopped listening until I heard
the baboons lived ninety whole days
before passing into nothingness

and the rear view became blurry
because I remembered a woman with an eggy voice
and a man with a long face
staring at each other in the middle of a mall once
and clearly having some sort of impact
while I walked by under a certain fluorescence;

the enormity of how small we are,
even now,
drowned me like a high tide
slowly consuming me from toe to eyebrow.

A whole ninety days:
how lucky —
how devastating.

“Perhaps,” the reporter said —
and the woman with the eggy voice
and her eyes of note
flashed across my mind —
“the heart
will now be ready
for human trial,”
which is a line that tore me in two so deeply
for the reason only
that I had not uttered it first.

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