Sweet

for weeks that summer my teenage son’s breath
was sickly-sweet like anti-freeze 

as though he’d just been chugging down
a neon blue slushie or two in town with friends

the kind of thing a high school student
should live to do, instead of learning to live

with a second-hand heart valve stripped
of its first host’s cells, frozen till needed

          by someone		my someone
          who jokes we gave him a “Walmart heart”

two months after turning sixteen
it was open heart on an August morning

outside we waited, the sun-warmed path
bisecting the butterfly garden, the air

full of transient wings and not even a passing
thought to who gave that valve and with it 

a future, its past invisible, just like the air.