Valarie Hastings

CORAZON

Have you forgiven me? I can’t blame you,
really, the way you wore yourself out for me
like a giant garnet pinned to my sleeve.
I’d say look at my beauty and you faceted, shone.
You couldn’t help diving in, never thinking about consequence.
Fluttering like hummingbirds inside the blue veins threaded
to my wrists. The boy on the train—you opened
to him like a red blossom as we moved from
the border towns south. What language were you
speaking? And later the men with their fast
cars and their big plans — you were always all
in, pouring yourself out like porch wine. I’m
sorry about the ablation. I couldn’t have known
what the surgeon would expose bringing me up
as he did from propofol, the sound of your dark
wings in the operating theater beating from speakers.
I felt your ragged beauty then, close
as life and death. But I couldn’t look
at the echocardiogram last week,
the intimacy of your chambers opening
and closing on the grainy screen beside
me, tunnels dark and intricate as tomb
shafts, the tech pushing the prod over
my chest, under my breasts. You became
something apart from me. And the sound you
made on the machine through water? Like
a woman weeping in wind—what it must
have been like when we were submerged deep
inside the goddess, echoing back
alongside the electromagnetic
muscle of her own heart. You’ve been
my unreliable narrator—all verb.
There were dead years
in a marriage when I didn’t hear from you at all. Maybe
I had stopped listening. But here you are now. My pulse.
My dance. Giving me that old feeling
in this wine bar about
to close. It’s the last pour.
Where to next?

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