Poetry Friday: "Sacred Heart"

Only one week remains in the pre-publication order window for my forthcoming chapbook.  Have you ordered yours yet?  If not, go here to order your copy.  It will ship in June, and you'll have a lovely summer treat.

You may ask, why not wait to order until it's ready?  Because the press run is determined by how many books are ordered in this time period.  If the sales reach certain levels, more books are published, and since a second printing is unlikely, it would be great to make it to some of those higher levels.
Here's a poem to whet your appetite. This poem was first published in Escape into Life.  To read the story of how the poem came to be, see this blog post.


Sacred Heart


You thought your heart
was a thing of feathers and frippery.
You envisioned the Mardi Gras mask
of your heart, the glittered borders, the bejeweled
chambers of celebration, blood bubbly as champagne.

You didn’t realize you would need to deconstruct
your rosary to have a sturdy
thread to stitch your heart
back together. But here you sit embroidering
fancy patterns with beaded embellishments.

You should have invested in a supply
of surgical thread, but your stash
of sacred relics will serve
you just as well, as you repair
your beating heart and pray
for happy endings.

To see how this poem interacts with others, order my forthcoming chapbook, Life in the Holocene Extinction,  here.  You'll find other poems of consolation and hope, poems that explore what elements of modern life give us hope in the face of all the stresses and calamities we face both individually, as a culture, and as a planet.