~
The Gash in my Heart is the Prettiest Part
“The gash in my heart is the prettiest part.”
This, from our daughter who’s 6
And who bought a carved-agate heart
On Amazon when we weren’t looking.
It cost three dollars, that heart,
And took three months to get here
From China or Taiwan or Vietnam or
Some other small country
Our own country once bombed hard and left.
Whittled into a heart, that agate,
And polished smooth as a lie
With a tiny irregular cavern of crystals
At its center, its heart
At the heart of this heart.
And it DOES look like a gash, the heart of this heart.
An irregular rip full of sugar-sized crystals.
She likes the word “gash,” our daughter,
Because she can read it and write it and
Knows what it means. “It’s a cut,”
She tells me, “cut deep.”
A gash is a cut cut deep.
“Excellent, sweetheart,” I tell her.
(I don’t tell her what else it means.)
But it’s not really a gash in this agate,
The heart of this heart. The pocket of crystals
Is endemic to it, this agate, this heart
And was only uncovered by the polishing.
She doesn’t believe me, our daughter,
And insists that the crystals are scabs on a wound.
Who am I to say?
I am, myself, just scabs stuck together
In the shape of a woman, and raw skin and blood.
I’m all gash, boys! but that’s terribly bitter.
Certainly not the sort of humor that I, myself, approve of.
Because the crystals in the gash in my heart
Aren’t sugar, but salt
(I packed it in there myself to keep the wound clean,
To keep me from rotting) and those
Crystals in that gash and the way that they burn
Tells me I’m alive still
And unspoiled and breathing, speaking, even,
Saying, “You may have a point,” to this daughter, this girl,
My heart, the heart of my heart.
~
Martha Stallman
Pushcart prize nominee Martha Stallman’s work has appeared in The James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, The Offing, Electric Literature, and Playboy. She lives and writes in Austin, Texas.