A Heart Like Yours

We call it history.

But you called it love

when you met the man on the bus in 1943,

left your first husband for him,

followed the pulse in your chest.

They said a woman doesn’t do that.

But you did.

Whispers followed you down the street.

But so did hope.

Hope that the heart knows something the world never will.

He became my great grandpa.

Your forever.

No one told you what forever might cost.

At the Christmas party in 1966 they watched.

Forks paused midair.

Eyes lingered.

You were talking about roses and soil,

as silence grew sharp around you.

While you were at the garden club every Saturday,

flowers weren’t the only things growing.

His careless indiscretions germinating.

HPV silently sprouting into cancer.

The doctors filled your womb with radium.

Burned the place where life had grown.

How often women carry the sentence for sins they didn’t commit.

How often love asks for blood.

So tell me, Nana, what do we do with a heart like that?

One that saves us and ruins us in the same breath?

Maybe love was never meant to carry us into sunsets.

Maybe it’s just the way women like us walk,

learning the ground by breaking hard against it.

Once he died you said you’d done your time.

No more vows. No more chances.

Still, I wonder what could have been

if your heart could have opened again.

Not to be saved.

Not to be proven right.

Just to beat freely,

without having to ask

what it might cost.