Kerrin McCadden

recipient of the New Issues Poetry Prize, Vermont Book Award, NEA Fellowship, and Sustainable Arts Foundation Writing Award; Associate Director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching at The Frost Place; her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner

How the Heart Works

I keep thinking about the way the heart works,
but I think about it wrong, on purpose, the way
I do other things on purpose that I shouldn't,
like one-click shop for books that wait for me
like dogs in cardboard coats until I come home
for them and let them in. No, I keep thinking
about the heart, the one my mother has.
There are all kinds of words for it, words
her doctor says, words she repeats to me
about what’s wrong with it. I see her, on the phone,
tied to the wall by a coiled cord, the doctor
blue-toothed on the other end, telling
her what is happening inside her ribcage,
the one I keep seeing like an ornate birdcage
someone has planted a tiny-leafed ivy
inside, hanging in the corner, or at
the edge of the fireplace, on a tiny table,
long spindly legs and a top as small
as a book, not as the housing it is for the heart
that does all kinds of things wrong, things
I can't know, no matter how many times the aorta
of it is repeated, no matter which
carotid phone call ends in semi-lunar
valves, there are always left and right atria,
greenhouses of the heart, the tricuspid valve-way
opening onto the patio my father has turned
over, stone by stone, so it looks new,
and pulmonary arteries growing like
hydrangea, there, outside the glass ventricle.

© 2010 Kerrin McCadden (Dzanc Books)

Latest Releases

Books are available now from:

TRIDENT BOOKSELLERS AND CAFE

BELMONT BOOKS

BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH

BEAR POND BOOKS

GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE