WHAT LOVE HAS BECOME
Just the other day, pieces of green glass in the parking lot:
beer bottles. For my collection. I grabbed
several pieces at once, careful
not to cut myself. I’ve seen
many bottles I’d like to break. The temptation
is strong when I sit at a bar, stare past the bartender
and think—not about what he’s saying, or what I’ll order next—
but my own heart, once a bleeding gash, healed now
to a clean white scar. When I was ten, I saw a dog’s heart
wrapped in heart worms, floating in formaldehyde
on a field trip to the vet’s, the whole class crammed
in the office. A loud thud. A classmate fainted, his head hit a scale.
I couldn’t talk to him after that, couldn’t look in his direction.
What if he fell again? What if I did? I didn’t think
of the heart’s disease, or the heart’s jar,
or the diseased heart in the jar,
only of the boy falling, his fragile head.
This poem first appeared in The Mid-American Review in Spring 2005.