HOLLY MA
some people have two hearts
ARTWORK: Jasmin Small I am not very good at crying but I’ll try to teach you how to wring it out of a heart that’s been cleaved clean from a chest and buried nineteen feet under the cracked tar on state highway one. It’s safe there. I wouldn’t dare park on the freeway to revisit a place where I once shovelled through blistered skin, brittle bones, balloons that kept my own chest rising and rising, to pull out this swollen and boiling organ (spewing with red love), that I handed over to a bucket of black oil that swallowed it whole. She was never going to give it back. So, I took a polaroid (for dramatic effect) and buried that instead. How to wring out a heart, you ask? Well, when your eyes have dried up, water must be pulped from the blood that bottlenecked through pipes with a fate of being pounded into paste and left to dry in the hinges of the photo frame that I’ve pulled out from under this mud, to try and teach you how to cry after giving away your heart.
37.
