by Kalehua Kim
Today someone sings about a broken heart.
Tomorrow I could sing about a broken heart.
The song on the radio can’t tear me like tissue
the way your grunts and groans shred my heart.
I hold your hand that can no longer hold mine.
Pressure builds, forces the chambers of my heart
to implode with a rush of feeling, a gush without a gash.
My ribs splay open, jagged fingers reaching for a heart
just out of reach. My lungs expand and contract
too quickly, a red balloon stretched thin, a heart
deflated and limp on the ground, still tethered to
a white ribbon around my wrist where some heart
pulses, beats a frantic rhythm against my skin.
How can you mend a broken heart?
The hospice nurse says your pulse is slow,
that your organs are shutting down. Your heart
is taking in less blood, pushing out less oxygen.
Although you are silent now, I hear your heart
rattle and clang like the Big Ben alarm clock
you wound each night before bed, its heart
an intricate puzzle of gears whose wheels
entwined like fingers before springing a heart
into action. I have no key to wind. No way to
revive you. I can barely gather my own heart’s
implosion, the shattered shards of my ribs will
never fit the same way around this damaged heart.
How can I, your only daughter, mend anything?
How can I, your only daughter, be mended?
Kalehua Kim is a Native Hawaiian poet living in the Seattle area. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Calyx, and ‘Ōiwi, A Native Hawaiian Journal.
Hawaii Pacific Review 