Heart Is A Body | prose
My heart is running in the era of operations, dirty tributaries smoking 'taqleef'. Open fields, wild flower, and motor-running water for the crops feels like lies to my face Aesthetics faces a crisis, cameras laugh at color gradings and grains. I can see no sunrise, no sunset. My city, daughter of ths capital, breathes smog. Pollution is ovulating, oscillating between fake skies and late dawn. I once felt like a king in the forest of my friends until they cut down all the trees and hissed behind my back, like snakes of the dark. Those gossipmongers called me fugly for building fences around my heart. Betrayal came flash-like. I sipped cold coffee from the canister only to realize it was green, garish matcha— served to produce algae and moss in my stomach bed. Diarrhea cringed in the intestines, my mouth vomited pleasing sacrifices. This heart is a joke now, dancing in the ribcage, leaning onto the dusty traffic, cooking low blood pressures, like a broken-down car.
We live in an age where hearts are treated like bodies: opened, befriended, broken, repaired, stitched and yet never healed.
—Helen Abraham
