Poetry By Linda Parsons

David Antis CC




STORIES OF THE HEART


The bag of pine bark heaved heat 
when I cut it open to mulch my hydrangeas, 
hot as summer’s pant, as breath expelled 

from a human chest sliced on the metal table 
in the OR. Have a heart, take heart, open heart, 
we say, our hands holding hope that whatever 

heart the hurt world offers is the strong and meaty 
kind, the kind kind. Not hearts treated and used 
unwisely, like two men on such a cold table—​

one not waking and living on into changed ways, 
another soon to go under the knife. We say 
that too, under the knife, as if bloodletting 

is like a good cry, as if all we need is to carve out 
the atrophy, leaky valve, clogged vein 
that keeps us from seeing the light—​

but we don’t want to walk into the light, 
that bliss beckoning down the long hall, 
not just yet. We don’t want to imagine that 

we already have the right tools lined up, fine 
enough to suture the self whole again. We don’t 
want to admit that we are both alpha and omega, 

our very own soulmate, our twin flame searched 
for over countless lifetimes, even more than 
the old dog at our feet, giving us the stare, 
saying with his coffee eyes that our beauty 

               is beyond all telling, 
               our heart sweeter than dinner. 




Linda Parsons is the Poet Laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee. She is also the poetry editor for Madville Publishing and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She is published in such journals as The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain, The Chattahoochee Review, Shenandoah, and many others. Her sixth collection is Valediction: Poems and Prose. Five of her plays have been produced by Flying Anvil Theatre in Knoxville. 



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