Five short lines, and already the reader is seated at a table with something that shouldn't be there. Dave Bonta's "Xenograft" takes its title from a medical term for living tissue moved from one species into another, and the first line turns that clinical word into a dinner companion: "It is a pig heart I dine with." The phrase "dine with" does a lot of work. We expect "dine on," with the pig as the meal. Instead the heart is a guest, or a roommate the speaker can't evict. If it is a transplant, it also sits inside the speaker's chest, so the speaker eats beside a stranger who is also part of the body doing the eating.
The poem never says what the pig heart stands for, and that restraint is part of its power. The animal itself suggests appetite, since we say "eat like a pig" and "make a pig of yourself," and the places that follow fit that suggestion. "Sometimes in hell and others / at Mother Rum's" sets a damned place beside what sounds, judging by the name, like a tavern or the keeper of one. The poem doesn't explain "Mother Rum's," but the name pairs a maternal word with liquor, a comfort that is also a vice. The phrase "sometimes... and others" gives these outings the feel of a routine, as if the speaker shuttles between the two as regularly as other people go to work and back. The grammar even slips, because "and others" leaves out the word "times." The sentence trails off a little, like speech after a few drinks, though that is my inference rather than something the poem states.
There is no rhyme here, and the lines are free verse, but the sound is carefully tied together. Four key words begin with the same breathy "h": *heart*, *hell*, *home*, *hand*. They run through the poem like a pulse, linking the organ, the damnation, the place of safety and the body part. A softer "m" chain connects "Mother," "Rum's" and "my." The line breaks matter too. "Others" dangles at the end of line two, and then the short third line, "at Mother Rum's," shuts like a door.
The turn comes in the last two lines, when the speaker stops confessing and starts giving orders: "Go home and be pretty again, / my left hand." The line break holds back the addressee. For a moment "Go home" could be aimed at the heart, at a companion, or at us. Then "my left hand" arrives and the speaker splits once more. Now there is an *I*, a borrowed heart and a hand that can be scolded, so the body begins to look like a crowd of separate characters. The choice of the *left* hand is quietly rich. The heart sits on the left side of the chest, and the Latin root of "sinister" means "left," though the poem doesn't push either association.
The tone of that command is its most surprising feature. After pigs and hell, the speaker talks to the hand as one might to a muddy child or a dog that has strayed: "be pretty again." The word "pretty" is small, domestic and a little comic. It also implies that the hand was once pretty and has been spoiled by whatever happened in hell or at Mother Rum's. The poem never says how, and the hand might be bruised, trembling or simply dirty. The word "again" is the only glance toward time, looking back at an earlier, cleaner self and forward to a hoped-for return.
That mixture is what makes "Xenograft" worth reading. In very few words it turns a surgical term into a picture of a divided self, one that carries something foreign and animal inside it and keeps going out into the world with it. It does this with dark humor and without self-pity, and it leaves the explanation to the reader. The speaker doesn't beg to be cured. He tells his hand, firmly and almost kindly, to go home.