three cardiectomies

I did not expect the cold.

I expected other things: her voice
On the phone, gritty and overlaid
With the hollow orders of the gps

Threads of frayed phrases
Tugged through a thickened throat
And the bass beat from
Someone else’s rolled-down window.

I didn’t expect it so soon, or so late
But it was not as shocking

As the ice on the asphalt
Or the wind at my back.

---

I imagine my heart is an armadillo

And his a wood frog, frozen
Like a stone and sunken
In the muck of his stomach.

There is something in my gut too

Unwelcome, uncurling
Not a dormant, dying love
But its anxious antithesis.

---

The streets should be silent under the snow
But there is always a generator hum,
A red-eye rocketing
Into Logan, the lonesome notes
Of a wind-chime. I passed a man,
His face familiar but his eyes
Dark and unknowable

(Your eyes were dark too that night
On someone else’s dingy couch
And I could not see my reflection in them)

As every eye is to another
Though I could read in his face that mine
Were wild and colorless,

Milky-clear like the plexiglass window
Of a plane

Only empty space beyond.