heart rot poems

Rust Belt Pastoral

By Lily Someson

A snap of ice beneath boot. Bloodroot, road that coils under highway overpass.

Control-fire dunes, black with soot. Dead grass, winter's imprint the color of evening goldenrod. Blue-collar hands — city cleaved from finger with tweezers from the medicine cabinet.

Growing up wading in waste ponds, big sisters on the lawn haloed in sticker burrs. A home is associative logic — imagined light in the peripherals. City as UFO sighting, disappearing like our Jäger-breathed fathers in after-work bar crawls.

Knowing the fields by their structure of sound, corn husks languished by the early frost. The blue gill of my heart — my city is airplane parts, steel mecca, seaweed brain. Midwest as necromancy, the past re-imagined. Blight of sun hitting oil ribbons floating to the white-knuckled shore. Strip clubs pinching the highway on either side, truckstop jubilee quilting the infrastructure. Outlet malls lolling in knapweed, an economy of metal and rust. I have come to understand this skeleton of buildings, this smoke-stack sky, fire collapsing through my open window. The factory of my want, thermal in nature. The ways fate has decided who is under the car, on the conveyor line, wielding blow-torches until snow turns to steam. Vacancy of self, like the tinny sound of January, lawnchairs and windchimes on an abandoned porch. We pray to the industrial God, who examines our weakness of will, blows helicopter leaves until they sing their thermal in nature. The ways fate has decided who is under the car, on the conveyor line, wielding blow-torches until snow turns to steam. Vacancy of self, like the tinny sound of January, lawnchairs and windchimes on an abandoned porch. We pray to the industrial God, who examines our weakness of will, blows helicopter leaves until they sing their yearly whistle. It is freeing, sometimes, to be forgotten. To live liminally. Zest of lemon in the pie window, smell of iron crowding the lungs.

The Coat

by Kelly Nicole

We found my friend’s body in a bare room. He left a hanging plant and a mug of affir mations: My kids love me My lif e has meaning All I need is within

If you feel hollow, take hear t. T he bones of a hummingbird have nothing inside and the universe is mostly space I can still feel my daughter at two slowly tracing my hand with a blue pencil T he tickle of wood and her small pulse ! yet my del ight tur ned fast to boredom

Now she fills her pockets with whatever’s left of Ear th: sad seeds, pieces of bone, coral from a doomed reef

I don’t know where to store loss. Floating shelf ? Mason jar? I want to show off this decay soon we’ll reminisce for the anthropocene

I, too, am tired and feel a duty to rot. Like the legs of his trailing ivy, my g rief is lengthening We all drag the long coat of our dead.

by Diana Dalton

mother swears the whole tree came down at once, that both of them did. old crabapples leaning toward each other for one last kisswhat a thunderous embrace!

it was the weight of the children that did ‘em in, really clambering the swings with apple-sticky hands, showing no respect - none! - to the branches of their elder she remembers it as an act of god burying her head in her hands to speak it now.

there’s no saving for a hollowed tree. no salve, denial, bargaining or prayer to summon the heartwood back. humble heartwood who never makes her absence known, before the birthday party revelers cry out from underneath.

the giant’s core has not disappeared, but multiplied. how pretentious we are! to think our eyes can measure time. heartwood becomes the earth underneath us, verdant stragglers gasping for light, the apple-full bellies of the ants old Methuselah will someday lose his heart, or, too wise for that, will wish it away will give it to a generation smog-choked to a child who holds a human among their branches perhaps, just perhaps, one who will not come down what has made us? no gods or hospitals, but dirty dew-wet moss we’ve forgotten. our hands and smiles wizen too - beautiful! our innards stay formaldehyde slush.