Brock Jones
Poetry
Brock Jones is an assistant professor of English at Utah Valley University and the author of Cenotaph (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), a finalist in the 2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Iowa Review, Lunch Ticket, Ninth Letter online, Poetry Daily, Raleigh Review, Sugar House Review, War Literature and the Arts, and others. He received a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. He’s a veteran of the U.S. Army and served three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Utah.
Cardiology
open, its network of ventricles and veins
exposed in the doctor’s palms
he walks us through circulation, pointing
out where my blood backflows and eddies
at the base of the aorta thanks to a stuttering valve.
Now we keep an eye on it, he says, placing the heart
back on its shelf. Later, we wait in the atrium
for an elevator. At least we know
you keep insisting. Better we know than not.
You stand at the water’s edge seeking my response
but I’m still treading that ultrasound’s
black river, bicuspid inheritance in stark white.
How strange now to feel the cadences
of this my plastic heart, one malformed
valve mawing like the mouth of a fish
caught and tossed on the shore.
“ In my late thirties, just prior to my fourth deployment, I was diagnosed with bicuspid aortic valve, a congenital heart-valve defect that had escaped detection by doctors and nearly 15 years of regular military health screenings. This particular poem came out of my initial attempts at coming to terms with the diagnosis. ”