Featured Poem II • October 2017
The Heart Stopped (Mid-Race)
Virginia M. Mohlere
Someone’s always throwing apples in the way and the heart, feather-ankled, with its hair waving behind like a flag, stumbles. Look at all those apples. How could you waste such beauties— one to eat with cheddar four to stew down for sauce, six to bake in a pie? Just to hold them and chant their names is a pleasure: Newton Wonder for cooking Cox Orange Pippin for eating Ashton Bitter for cider, to drink your troubles away. Here is the heart, standing in a kitchen with apples. There was a destination. There used to be somewhere the heart was going.
Virginia M. Mohlere was born on one solstice, and her sister was born on the other. Her chronic writing disorder stems from early childhood. She lives in the swamps of Houston and writes with a fountain pen that is extinct in the wild. Her work has been seen in Jabberwocky, Lakeside Circus, Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, and Through the Gate.
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