Archive
Apart
from Evening Sun by Aline Soules
I’ve given you away.
I don’t know who got
your lungs or eyes or
bones, but your heart
went to a young woman
with two small children.
She wrote to say that it will
slowly give way to her body’s
disease, but not before
she sees her children grow.
You’re a busy man,
living in so many places
at the same time. Maybe
you breathe in the chest
of a man just down the street,
or look at a lake through the eyes
of a boy who has only known
its sound or the chill
of its lapping waves. Perhaps
you hike up a mountain
in the now-sturdy legs
of a woman on the other side
of the country.
Yet, the more those legs
take you away from me
and your heart pumps in another,
the more you breathe
to a different rhythm
and each of us sees people and places
the other will never know,
the more my empty heart
wonders if we have met again,
neither of us able to recognize
that we are together still.
“Apart” first appeared in The Houston Literary Review, May 2009 (PDF).
Aline Soules’ work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her book The Size of the World was published as a flip book by Plainview Press in tandem with Nancy Ryan’s The Shape of the Heart. Since then, she has written a manuscript of prose poems which have appeared in such journals as Kaleidowhirl, Tattoo Highway, Boiling River, and the Kenyon Review. Other poems from her chapbook manuscript Evening Sun have appeared in Shaking Like a Mountain and Inertia. Visit her writing blog at alinesoules.wordpress.com.
qarrtsiluni 