The Zingara Project

Tag: love

  • Having Her Say by K.L. Frank

    This girl,
    burns past me in the Student Union.
    Her passing flash awakens memories
    of days dragging around more heat
    beneath my jeans than my years
    should have stoked. I longed
    to inflame the sky with shibboleths,
    and watch them flash like fireworks.
    This girl,
    who can’t be hauling around
    more than twenty years, wears
    black sweat pants low slung.
    The waistband straddles
    the curve of her hipbone –
    a circus rider performing tricks
    for her audience. ‘PINK’ appliqued in pink
    outlined in pink sequins glitters
    across her butt (the space between ‘I’ and ‘N’
    floats over her coccyx) twitching
    as she walks away.
    This girl’s
    hips affirm louder as they sway
    than the slogans burning my lips.
    No matter the cause, her bumper sticker
    assumes mythic proportions
    against a load-bearing bumper.
    Be she touting a balm against violence,
    a signature hue, a favored singer, or
    support for breast cancer research,
    whatever her say,
    this girl
    has my vote.

    —

    Karin L. Frank is an award-winning author who lives on a farm in the Kansas City area. Her poems and stories have been published in a wide variety of venues both in the U.S.A. and abroad. Her first book of poems, A Meeting of Minds, was released in April, 2012.

  • It’s Not Simple, the Heart— by Lois Marie Harrod

    artery-fisted, three-pronged aorta
    with its middle finger twisted up

    yours and better be. Brachiocephaliac
    to the right, left common carotid in the middle,

    and left, the left subclavian: the blood-draggled glove
    of a penniless troll, the knot

    of a neglected vegetable, fennel, celeriac,
    but the heart always left, left behind,

    left below, and common, that too,
    the neck, the head, and left again,

    and yet it keeps on beating, who could guess?
    Drum and drum skin, thick stick, complicit.

    The complicated heart because complexity’s simpler
    than simplicity? Think Bach:

    his great heart with mitral and aortic valves all throbbing,
    oh who loves him more than I, this year

    when no one is performing Brandenburgs in public,
    nothing now but the sound of the recorded heart,

    played to calm an infant, sound’s knotted beauty,
    septum, septum, do you not love the septum,

    the separation, the beat between the beats,
    dirt clot and fairy tubules, clenched face of an infant

    dismissing what fed him, the ventricles, the valves
    the Greeks thought we think with the heart?

    The heart’s a hollow muscle.
    Some days I want to think with mine too.

    —

    Lois Marie Harrod’s 16th collection Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016. Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis and How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth, in 2013.  Widely published in journals and online, she teaches Creative Writing at TCNJ. Visit her website: www.loismarieharrod.org