Ronda Piszk Broatch
APRIL DAY WITH HOLTER MONITOR
When you said fit one of these words into your bra, I thought of the wires attached to me like an itchy octopus. I press the button marked Symptom each time my heart flips, each time I fall into a whirlpool or my breath is loath to catch up with me on the stairs. When I dream of black foxes, put me on a boat to the San Juans. Let me leave my heart in a calico pocket. The stranger imagines the stormbirds into being, picks flower lightning and looks behind her not often enough. Living where future abounds, sounds like a jellyfish jumping from a rib of coral, I pull my blouse up over my electrodes, hang a tiny engine from a lanyard around my neck. Before there was anything even remotely resembling me, there were cherry trees, there was the language of despair. What the world doesn’t know fits into a locket. Unweave the locks of the dead, and a bell tower might fall, a cathedral collapse. On my tongue, the words of my people taste like plums coated in dough and rolled in breadcrumbs. And when the sun stays with me for so many days, I forget how much I love Mars, its blue dunes. When you told me to stitch the idea of rapture to my bra with an eye-lash needle, I wondered what made the water slip Mars’ hard skin. Someday I’ll have to get used to falling apart at the seams, to become one with the fathomless god, count the quantum strings in every ventricle of my octopus heart.