Poetry Magazine
Your Other Heart
Mossy and thumping, bare of logic, red:
why do they say your other head
and not your other heart?
The snack cakes of Smut Wonderland
turn Alice smaller than her dress. She stirs,
nude in the folds of so much baby blue.
To think, they called this lesser art.
I ate mostly orders then, and you—
you were thinking with your other heart.
I took in a dog the way some might take in
a dress (I had become just skin).
It coughed. I cried for it
to stop, I fed it meat, its malady
recurrent and untreatable. I had
to give it up, like some bum body part
whose incidental benefit
the human form has out-evolved. Don’t start.
That dog: I called it Help, and I cried for it.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2012).
Biography
Natalie Shapero’s poetry has appeared recently in the Believer, New Republic, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection, No Object, will be published by Saturnalia Books in 2013.
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Living, Disappointment & Failure, The Mind, Love, Desire, Relationships, Pets
Poetic Terms Metaphor
If you disagree with this poem's categorization, make a suggestion.
Poem of the Day: Your Other Heart
Your results will be limited to content that appeared in Poetry magazine.
