After Lucie Brock-Broido
And to the lost, I say: don’t fret.
The heart, a muscle, regenerates.
I laid down and undressed myself in his Thomas Pink.
I did not like the fiber of him.
You are a lysosome that degrades rapidly.
An organelle can fail just like that.
Did I forget to mention that?
It’s what keeps you alive.
No one close to me has ever died.
I’ll probably be the first to stave off atrophy of the heart.
It never occurred to us to ask how much time was left.
We’d assume we’d always be melted like this,
my head in your nape, tilted,
longing for your mouth.
Lilly Beshore’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, The Southampton Review, and The South Carolina Review, and others. Her first chapbook, When We Stood, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014. She attended the May Poetry Session at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School.