If a Heart Beats in the Forest…
Marisa P. Clark
Look how small
her love
has made this heart:
this lump of muscle
hunkered down
& hiding out
a feral creature
shackled & impounded
bumping at its cage
of ribs
with no desire
to return
to freedom & the wild
hard work
of the hunt.
See it shrink half
from hunger half
in fear it might break
bones or slip
through the spaces
get lost & have
to fend for itself
again
remembering
her open
hand that stroked
as if to tame
& take it home
but then withdrew
abandoning
this pacing undumb
beast still aroused
& shuddering this
thumping drum
whose quickened beat
spreads loud
& far beyond
the forest she loves
me she loves its roar
goes unlistened to
me not
unheard.
Marisa P. Clark is a queer writer from the South whose work appears or will appear in Shenandoah,Cream City Review, Nimrod, Epiphany, Foglifter, Potomac Review, Rust + Moth, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. In 2011, Best American Essays recognized her creative nonfiction among its Notable Essays. Twice the winner of the Agnes Scott College Writers’ Festival Prizes (in fiction, 1996; in nonfiction, 1997), she reads fiction for New England Review. She makes her home in New Mexico with three parrots and two dogs.