The Head and The Heart

When was the last time that you cried?
that you carried jars of tears in your clenched hands,
knuckles white like the moons that you sacrifice your tears to.
when was the last time that you broke?
like truly broke into something as lilliputian as breadcrumbs,
that the lions in your heart followed until they met the wolves in your mind.
did you know that there is eighteen inches between your head and your heart?
when was the last time that you laughed?
roared until your body could not entrammel that intemperate energy
and your lips cracked from smiles too vast and eyes overrun
because there are some feelings that human confines cannot express
and that is the mysterious place where people travel to in their dreams
and where people who die from broken hearts go to after death.
Sometimes I forget to feel,
the world is so ravaged by noise,
noise picking the last bits of meat off of every bone
it leaves nothing, even for the child who prays to the ceiling
for a spell of silence so she can sleep.
There is an indigo rattlesnake that catenates behind me,
her tail prattles like an aimless talker in my ear;
and every time the moon coaxes me to cry
I can hear her stirring, the rattlesnake,
her tail driveling like a war drum though she has no army
and I can hear the bones of the mouse stuck in her throat
that I pray make her choke, choke, choke.
The child prays to the ceiling and I pray to the moon,
but we both pray for the garden
where there are wolves
and there are lions
and they both laugh and cry.

-anna sluder

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