Burning Heart Emoji
BY GENEVIEVE DEGUZMAN
Envy the cicada, the fruit fly, the honeybee
with their mere testimony of weeks. Midges
intrepid for hours and then gone. Mayfly
on the stand for even less, a femme fatale
that fatales in five minutes flat. Their dying
is a gentle tinnitus. A nothing rattle.
And maybe our living is as delicate too.
Dainty saucers in a curio case, trembling
on a glass shelf—trembling with stories
about family, stories that bless and burden
us like too much food. How to be custodian
to things that started long before me?
Before hunger and feast. Before forest sprites
and tree folk and cursed kin fighting over
money. I am talking all the way back, surveillance
aunties. Pre-history. Back to mitochondrial
invasions set in bass-y geological time.
Because ordinary are these days.
Boring this moon in the sky. Sleepy the cat
snaking around legs like static electricity.
And Mom not yet— when we were all still
a billion healthy cells floating in a prenatal
vacation rental in Palm Springs. At Orfield Labs
in Minnesota, they built the quietest place
on earth, rooms with chambers like wombs
where you can hear your organs clamor
for mercy. Living body as sound itself.
After her death, I could hear my mother
craning to look at me. Her body a clacking
abacus bearing record. Her gaze on me
deafening. I shouted back prayers in texts
burning hearts in repeating rows—
though with no lance or crown of thorns
to mark our wounds holy. All the while
the mayfly darts to oblivion, and ice sheets
in Greenland melt, and tectonic plates
off the Oregon coast bide their time
before killing us all. Everyone was so distracted
that no one bothered to swat me dead.
I got to live instead. For some 300 seconds
I think about my mother, how she, too,
trembled on glass. And I hear the mayfly speak,
beating inside my scorched chest. Fire.
Heart on fire. My heart on fire.
