You got your feelings hurt at school, again,
you tell me seriously
that you feel a heartbeat
thump thump thunking
in your pet rock, you swear you can.
I say it’s your own heartbeat,
in your palm, hammering.
I am straddling dinner
and your brother’s baseball game—
and you try to explain
how your best friend tried to make you
throw the stupid thing away.
I say I told you not to take it to school,
I told you, over and over,
a rock is a rock is a rock.
I almost say, out loud, baby
sometimes you’re just too much
but your breaths are coming hard,
your small chest heaves—love,
there is nothing weak about you.
I turn the stove off.
You let me hug you,
the pulse of you
barely surface deep.
When you let me hold him,
Rocky is still warm.
You believe in so many things,
even me.
–
Rebecca Brock’s work can be found in The Threepenny Review, Mom Egg Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, Each Bearing Out, will be published by Kelsay Books in Fall 2022. Idaho born, she is raising her two sons in Virginia and still isn’t used to the humidity.