NICK MARTINO—"OPEN HEART SURGERY" (Issue 24)

Sugar House Review · Nick Martino's "Open Heart Surgery"

OPEN HEART SURGERY 

Bowing in their paper crowns, the surgeons
settle down for dinner
in the dining room of my father’s body.
A good son, I set the table: bone china, copperware.
The silver gently gleaming. I don’t know what to do
about the heart, that horn of plenty.
In the myth, infant Zeus breaks the horn
of the she-goat who nurses him.
Her name means Run to tenderness.
My father’s body is the book
of worship on the table, open
to a razor-thin page, warmed
by strangers’ hands. He is the winter apples
I offer our guests, an orchard—
red curtain I hide behind.
Ashamed, Zeus blesses the horn
with infinite abundance. This teaches me
to apologize with both hands: Dad,
I haven’t called you in thirty-three days.
I eat well. I know most days you eat alone,
at a bar downtown, watching whatever’s on.

ABOUT THE POET

Nick Martino grew up alongside the ocean of Lake Michigan. As an MFA 

candidate in poetry at UC Irvine, his work has been published in Volume 

Poetry, quiet lightning, and Foothill Journal.

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