Heart by Stephanie Pippin

I wanted something whorish
and hard-driven, a Queen
in a short reign,
a zoo wolf unmuzzled,
on parole from her cage.

I imagined the color—
a puddle of flush, of stop
and seduce, red as a filched lipstick.
It is not what I expected, this heart—
Shotgun target, it throbs
like a girl at a dance.

It opens and shuts like a doll's eye.
My hands are a different story.
They can hold on
to bits of you, or wander
pharmacies, filling themselves
with candies and aspirin.

They can say closed and mean fist •

Stephanie Pippin holds a M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis where she is currently a Writer-in-Residence. Her poems have appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Lyric Poetry Review, and Ploughshares.

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