Narrated by Anne Carly Abad
Bodily adornments
have come a long way
from MAC, Dior, Guerlain;
Vera Wang, McQueen, Gucci…
Ace Hardware has become the boutique,
supplying the grease, the nuts, the bolts,
the drills, the wrenches and the hammers
for all our bodily needs, not to mention
an entire section for customization. There,
I set my eyes on metals & polymers:
a novel hand of etched titanium,
alabaster legs of carbon fiber,
ears of filigreed palladium
and lastly, I order a new heart to be
crafted from silver, gold, platinum
and all manner of luxurious alloys,
but oh, when I bare myself
to my husband, all he sees is the heart.
Where’s the old plastic one? he cries
for the heart he has been married to
for over ten years. How to tell him
it’s still me but better,
when all he hears is my alien beat,
a rattling that has him refusing sleep?
Give her back, he demands, or he’ll leave.
I’ve no choice but to dig the old one out;
leave my new heart out there in the cold
as biting as the gilding in my bones.
AUTHOR BIO: Anne Carly Abad’s haiku recently received an honorable mention in the Basho Haiku Festival Tournament (Japan, 2013). Her work has appeared or will appear in Dreams & Nightmares, Songs of Eretz, and Strange Horizons. Find out more about her at http://the-sword-that-speaks.blogspot.com/