Nathalie Shapiro - Your Other Heart

[highlyeccentric]

Mossy and thumping, bare of logic, red:
why do they say your other head

and not your other heart?

The snack cakes of Smut Wonderland
turn Alice smaller than her dress. She stirs,
nude in the folds of so much baby blue.

To think, they called this lesser art.

I ate mostly orders then, and you—
you were thinking with your other heart.

I took in a dog the way some might take in
a dress (I had become just skin).

It coughed. I cried for it

to stop, I fed it meat, its malady
recurrent and untreatable. I had
to give it up, like some bum body part

whose incidental benefit

the human form has out-evolved. Don’t start.
That dog: I called it Help, and I cried for it.

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Published (with an audio recording available) in poetry magazine