Your facts are useful, and yet, they are not my dwelling.
– Walt Whitman
My heart refuses to live in my heart,
refuses to live in the fact of my body.
It keeps flying the coop with its bumble
bee wings. Each day, my heart lifts a body
too heavy for its strength, a body so
in love with gravity, it weighs three times
what it weighs. Weight is both a number and
a value. A number is a fact that builds
a fence around a space and says no one
can enter and no one can leave, but
my heart is a burrowing creature. It has
tunneled out of more prisons than it’s been
confined to, which should be impossible,
but my heart will not dwell in the possible.
–
Suzanne Langlois’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Maine Review, NAILED Magazine, Cider Press Review, Off The Coast, and Rattle, as well as on the Button Poetry channel. Her collection Bright Glint Gone was selected as the winner of the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Chapbook Series. She teaches high school English in Portland, Maine, and is currently an M.F.A. candidate at Warren Wilson College.