Nyssa Cheruvattam, nestled
WHAT MAKES THIS HEART GO BANg BANG
My dead friend’s belt still lives
in the trunk of my car. He gave it to me one night
while we were dancing, back when I
was a washed-out strobe
of amphetamine and bones, too thin
to hold up my clothes. Now, all it takes
is a breakdown, and I reach for a spare,
and I’m there in time to smell the tires,
see the woman when she clicked on her brights
to find my friend, racing toward her,
his eyes wide as his smile.
And I didn’t lift a finger to help him.
I just rambled, high as a ghost
through Maglites and sirens,
wondering where his shoes went
and how weird it was because he
was always so well dressed,
even in the middle of the road,
and then I remembered the dead woman
in the skirt I saw when I was little,
how my father barked, Stop gaping!
but my mother hissed, Look harder,
and the woman lay there, soaked
in the limes of headlights.
She didn’t have shoes either.
And on nights like this,
when the evening is a slow-burning fever
thick with shadows and laced with crickets,
sometimes I pretend the shoes that hang
from the power lines
above our heads belong to the dead,
and whenever there’s lightning,
a surge, or whenever you’re talking
to someone whose voice sounds
so good all you can say is, Dang,
that energy could shoot through
the soles of the sneakers,
their eyelids would open, and they’d remember
how running felt before it was away
from getting older, sober. Sometimes
I worry there’s not enough
good in me to start over. And when I do,
I pretend I could become small
enough to climb through the keyhole
of a china cabinet and hide out in the dust
and empty of the glasses until I’m ready
to come out and just care again.
Because if you think you can forgive me,
if you think you could love me, let’s pretend—
it could be easy—that my fist could be a shell
you could press to your ear. These secrets,
the innermost parts of me, slipstream
beneath the currents of my chest
where you can hear what makes
this heart go bang bang.