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Hummingbird Heart:

Grace E Wagner

Updated: 6 days ago

I did not like to be held as a child

trapped in my mother's lap. Her arms

constricting, every fidget of my body. Nowhere

for my head to go, except the shallow

blanket of flesh and bone cradling her

hummingbird heart.

 

It beat

like a windstorm.

It shifted

And could gush like molasses

or spit like lighting

and no matter what

I could not move

just lay there eyes wide open,

feeling everything a child shouldn’t

 

It did not mean I did not love her

I just hated thinking, that’s all kids were for

I loved to be out in the backyard more

Just beyond the garden, lived a tree line

I was tiny yet, curious enough to crawl and find

a little hollow place inside where the branches ended

and an oasis created itself

 

I’d lay there, no less small, but feeling very big

I’d breathe it all back into the earth

until my hummingbird heart quit

pounding like a sugar rush

 

Until all movement slowed

and the fidgets could be free

I could dissolve back into myself

just me, just there, just to be

 

with my own hand

on my own hummingbird heart

only alone, did it ever feel

like it belonged entirely to me


 

Grace E Wagner is a poet, and nervous system in recovery. She lives in Fort Wayne IN, and holds a degree in Creative Writing, from Ball State University. Her poems, “Keep Me Around,” “Kaleidoscope Girl,” and “Rambling to Persephone” have been featured in the Wild Sound, Bangalore Review, and Scapegoat Review literary magazines. Grace loves butterflies and drinks too much coffee. Her poetry says everything she can’t articulate linearly. These poems are for Nellie.


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