Lost Heart
Though she gets along fine without it, one day, La Araña’s heart arrives in a small Fedex box. It’s supposed to be frozen, but the dry ice is long gone. The heart is warm and beginning to smell.
What’s that sudden thumping in her ears? She remembers having had blood...she stood in Graziela’s kitchen in Rome, slicing an eggplant, and sucked the cut. It had tasted rusty, or maybe green. Graziela’s last words to her, Verde, que te quiero verde. —Cold day in hell, her retort.
Every time someone wants her, she loses heart. She imagines Graziela drinking absinthe on the balcony with Lorca and C.D., but La Araña can only wish, as she inhales the odor of ripening muscle in the Fedex mailer, as Felix, her companion goat, browses the packaging.
The label, penned in Graziela’s hand, is dated ten years into the future. Her heart will have begun to rot by the time it arrives...her heart of garnet, ashes, heart of light...La Araña mutters, You’ve been at the books again, O, Nimble Goat of Blank Verse.
Bearing the box on her hip, she launches down the stairs in iambs, jolting the heart into synchronous beating. Che fa, La Araña scolds, Neapolitan for What the hell. The heart in the box keeps drumming, As any she belied with false compare—and, looking up from his poems, the pentametrical goat speaks: Oh, Yeah.
© 2014 Katherine Williams
This is a “Simmerman” poem, set up as an absurdist prose poem. C.D. Wright has a cameo here with Lorca, whose brilliant “Verde, que te quiero verde” you can catch performed on YouTube by the DivaDams. In the last paragraph is another reference to Shakespeare”s “Sonnet 130.”
The author gratefully acknowledges publication of “Lost Heart” in Spillway 23, Susan Terris, Ed. Huntington Beach: Tebot Bach Press (2015)
