Stephanie K. Merrill

Finding the Heart

   My grandmother always ate
the heart of the chicken.
   Maybe if she’d known chickens
are smart & watchful
   she would not have killed them
so easily in the early mornings of summer.
   Maybe if she’d known chickens
pass down their cultural knowledge
   from generation to generation
the chopping block
   would have become
an impromptu altar.

   Once I heard the heartbeat
of the Narwhal Whale     
   drumming
their deep & slow
   iambic pentameter    
a shaman in the ocean.

   I read somewhere
that Blue Whales can survive
   on just two heartbeats per minute
& you can hear the beating two miles away    
   a diving of vast dimensions
transplanting into pure being     
   all the deadlines we make for ourselves
cancelling the chimera of our brains.

   In the women’s room
at the blues club
   scrawled in yellow chalk
on the stall of the door
   amidst the bass notes beating
I read: Lisa & Janie forever
   & I remember decades ago
my grandmother dancing polka
   with her sister nun at a wedding     
two women in perfect synchronicity     
   the heart-speech of gratitude
filling the dance hall

   & today as out of some Angelus Prayer
at dawn I hear
   my dead grandmother laughing
her open heart rolling
   across the prairie grasses of morning     
oh heart!
   whose iamb echoes clear    
the fresher aspects of a hen’s crowing.

   I rise above the horizon      
my grandmother’s heart cleaving
   so solidly inside me
the boisterous merriment     
   the hilarity of her essence
imprinting on me    
   a whole lifetime of women dancing.