The poem is no longer available on the magazine’s website.
This poem is a weird dude — a little bit of alchemy, a little bit of heartbreak. It’s one that I wrote in the margins of a longer fiction project & goes out to the man who lives in my head & has weathered the worst at the whims of my plots.
what the heart isn’t through a process of elimination
The light bleeds green — the tin-glow of heaven
transmuted in a puff of breath; the jailed sighs
of a lioness rattle against the gnash of her teeth;
her eyes are emerald darts, a sure shot to the root
of the universe, hit with a dry crack of cage & bone.
Free this unfaithful heart to spread wide & become
a plateau; smooth the furrows of the earth & invite
the stars to light the blood-dull blades of battle
as they fall away. Shake as you ask if our hearts
have ever been concerned with anything
other than keeping time? Watch your love lean
against the sky & smirk, a callous champion
who pulled three swords from you only to watch
you bleed out. It is love that has ended you, love
has plucked the sun from the sky & tucked it
into his breast pocket to declare us free from
the tyranny of the soul; he says the heart is
a magnet, it is cobalt & Jupiter, it is too big
for the likes of you. Answer in sighs of defeat,
in the roar of the sea, in the rumble of the earth
still as four hellish claws trot, vitriol stalks, insatiable
for the hearth star’s stolen gleam, a jewel in the folds
of his cape; have no heart, only hunger. She is sulfur
& the heart is a star, the heart is a reactor, the heart
is secret fire, & she aches as a pitiful galaxy sings, gravity
working on the strong wall of his chest; the mother
of aurum will open him like a door & swallow, the threads
of the universe dangle from her jaw, & in her consuming,
another sun will rise & another sword will draw.