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Two Poems
by Kristin Aardsma



The Longest Heart Attack

This quiet smells of singed hair & gasoline
kept still in pails. My wheels scream
like rabbits & it’s only the noise. The places
I go have passed— your slick hair,

my burnt dog, a dead house. These bones
are gravestones & I’ve stopped playing.
The longest heart attack is this lake,
this small ocean of snow & my nose

drips a foreign liquor no one can drink.
I’ll show you this all if you bring
any hanky of heart, a bone-colored cotton—
the same as my worn skin. I lay my tangram

skeleton on the shore but the waves aren’t
human enough to wash away. Everyone watches
the heart attack but I am not dubbed; I am a lit
building spitting codes of alphabet to false-ears.

Gravity Fleers

Left hand, streaked with wrought iron
sweat & one bushel of mole hair,
held the heart with the ease of a smallish
water balloon, artery-less. A rolled
sweater sleeve, an astronomy of hair
in the light – canyon continental forearm
drifts down toward the human head in her other

hand. Oviparously, the head fell into a carriage
of rodents. The plangent squeals roused
merry-go-round laughter & eye squints
toward the off white sky. We sat on the edge
of the rafter, the raconteur & I, waiting
to catch the drying heart. His new mobility,

littered with queening consent, a moped & of course
the law of falling bodies, brought the unexpected
responsibility of thick energy. In our own liquid bodies,
we shred waiting for the last piece to fall, to see
its speed, to know how parricidal we will at once become.
If she drops the heart in our water hands, she will be
the first with knowledge of our evaporation & gruesomeness.