Gourmands
		
	Remember the two of us mugging it up on the Boston Commons,
	auburn and black silk floating free over black trench coats,
	fish-net stockings, Egyptian eyeliner.

	Siddhartha and Holden Caulfield spoke to us 
	as we slavered butter on Pewter Pot nut muffins
	and kept a close watch out for truancy officers.
	We had no appetite for school that day.

	Panhandlers suffered us as we enriched them.
	We swallowed their words like 
	baby birds swallowing worms.
	The drunks raised their brown bags in a toast,
	their smiles missing their mark.

	Tiny shops gorged with beads, candles, posters,
	zig-zags, and incense.
	Outside audacious squirrels quarreled with passersby
	over fallen acorns.
	Gold and red paper crackled beneath our hungry strides
	as we lapped up the lavish banquet laid before us.

	The bloated swan boats belched across the pond,
	the sight making us laugh,
	while we gobbled up the miles like a greedy train.
	The slice in the air meek compared to our bite when
	buffeted by bold young men, clearly too dumb to recognize
	what stripe of creature they had bothered.

	Red-hot tigresses, prowling and voracious,
	we chewed a tawny path through the sumptuous smorgasbord,
	until heavy with delight, we flopped down and viewed our kingdom.
	Royally satisfied until the next time our stomachs growled.

 

 

	Heart Murmurs
		
	You are an experiment on the cutting edge of science.
	Blades of panic scissor through you even as you smile 
	for the doctors, nurses, and press photographers.
	You’re a celebrity!  Because you are heartless.

	You hear the beat echoing through empty chambers, 
	softly thudding through corridors of memory as the beat of drums 
	thrums softer through distance and space.
	Now, the whirring in your chest replaces 
	the pounding of your real heart.

	A battery of men in green scrubs replaced your weary, 
	forlorn flesh with battery operated titanium-plastic: 
	Soft-ball sized, like the fear in your throat as you count 
	the days on the calendar and wonder if the whirring, whining, 
	whizzing in your ears will make you crazy.

	The doctors stressed, “You’ll die within a month without this operation.”
	You knew they were right because every day shrank 
	as fast as plastic wrap applied to a flame.  
	You’d become an infant, cribbed and incontinent.
	Your body’s stalwart soldiers succumbed to battle fatigue: 
	liver and kidneys exhausted and defeated.

	The doctors pushed: “This procedure will give you a month.”
	A month, for a month you said to yourself, the decision 
	waxed and waned, heavy in your chest.
	The cardiologists pressed, “A transplant is possible: 
	otherwise death is inevitable.”
	You knew, because every atom pulsed at this quaking threshold.
	You tasted its moldering molecules on your tongue.

	Those cool operators bought you time, time enough to relive 
	all your worst fears and give birth to new.  
	Now you wonder how long your batteries will last and 
	who will die to give you a new heart and if it will work.
	You wonder if the beat of the new heart will be like the beat of the old, 
	and you wonder if you’ll miss the whir of plastic.

	You wonder where worn out, 59-year-old hearts go.
	Is there a trash bin for all the broken hearts?
	Do they get burned like diseased corpses?
	Pulverized like meat in a garbage disposal?

	Your thoughts pump thickly through a sludge of questions. 
	Can the transplanted heart of a misanthrope embrace love?
	If you inherit the heart of a teenager, will you feel young?
	What if you inherit the heart of a criminal, cop, or clergyman?
	Will that make you crooked, concerned or god-loving?
	You know you are god-fearing.  Proof whirs in your chest.

	You cannot escape the chasm into which you’ve been thrown.  
	Each time you attempt to scale these newly slick walls, 
	your grip slips and you slide down.
	Dizzy with defeat.  Dumb with despair.

	Your mind is wheeling, while your heart is whizzing, whining, whirling.
	A furious cardiac crescendo of circadian rhythms.
	You just          Want it          to stop   

 

 

Suad Campbell lives in Lakeside with her husband and son. Raised in Massachusetts, and tired of the long winters, she moved to Southern California, fell in love with the weather and stayed. A court reporter in her former life, she became a homemaker and student after her second son was born.