Callie Plaxco
It Occurs to Me that the Sound of My Heart is Keeping Me Awake
The impulse to rip it out and smash it
through the open window arises. Just to see it
thunder through space, to know if it will fall flat
like a fledgling smattered or if, perhaps
it will fly. My six-year-old comes home from school
and announces something remarkable.
We are always flying, he says, because atoms
never fully touch one another. It occurs to me
that I have never had this thought however true
and I am caught winded by the sensation of flight,
by the pure dazzlement of a lifetime of unknown levity.
The Latin Viriditas comes to mind – that green life force
beating through the living world. The sound, again,
of my own blood pulsing. The way it floods through
the channels of my insides and seeps out.
Not so much a lullaby but a war cry, the never-ending
story of wakefulness. In the darkness, a dog out there
somewhere left in a yard barks incessantly.
Still the heart beats louder. Still it beckons me awake.
And then, of course, the child and his nightmare.
Poor thing, half asleep clinging to me
as if something just might take him away.
As if he knows my secret desire, to toss him out
the open window to see his wings work frightfully
as they pound pound pound against the atoms, each
one separate from the other. I hold him tightly,
attempt to press ourselves together as one
impossibly and go to sleep.
Return to Motherhood’s Duality Folio
As her grandmother once said, Callie Plaxco flew the coop when she left South Carolina to journey west to the University of Wyoming for her MFA in Creative Writing. Her chapbook “Dear Person” is available at Dancing Girl Press, and individual poems have appeared in Greensboro Review, Carve Magazine, Mom Egg Review, SWWIM and Sugar House Review. She is the 2024 recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council’s Neltje Blanchan Writing Award.