American Life in Poetry

People speak of “hearts and flowers” when they’re talking about poems with predictable sentimentality, but here’s an antidote to all those valentines, from Sally Bliumis-Dunn, who lives in New York. Her most recent book of poems is Second Skin, Wind Publications, 2010.

Heart

She has painted her lips

hibiscus pink.

The upper lip dips

perfectly in the center

like a Valentine heart.

It makes sense to me—

that the lips, the open

ah of the mouth

is shaped more like a heart

than the actual human heart.

I remember the first time I saw it—

veined and shiny

as the ooze of a snail—

if this were what

we had been taught to draw

how differently we might have

learned to love.