Marjie Giffin

Cardiologist

Marjie Giffin

I guessed my pressures might rise the second I crossed the threshold into your room, a space where the slightest fluctuations are duly captured and transmitted

on undulating screens that strain my neck to read and can only be caught in waves that I ride with eyes and stomach juices churning as I squint across an airless divide.

Why am I afraid? The heart doesn’t lie. Mine will not betray me, but it might reveal secrets of its own that I prefer not to know as I lie here chilled, draped in scanty gown.

Cold and sticky tabs dot my chest and relay graphic messages that spell out my fate: Is my inner clock ticking to a healthy beat or is it time to trade for a new mechanism

to keep me vital, to keep me free of tethers to meds and breathing tanks and pitying glances and weekly trips to see you, the one I dread, cardiologist?

Marjie Giffin is a Midwestern writer who has authored four regional histories and whose poetry has appeared in Snapdragon, Poetry Quarterly, Flying Island, The Kurt Vonnegut Literary Journal, Saint Katherine Review, Northwest Indiana Literary Journal, Blue Heron Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Agape Review and the anthologies The Lives We Have Live(d) and What Was and What Will Be, Leave them Something, and Reflections on Little Eagle Creek. Her work was recently featured online by the Heartland Society of Women Writers and her first chapbook, Touring, was published in 2021. She lives in Indianapolis and is active in the Indiana Writers’ Center and has taught both college writing and gifted education.