By: Georgianna Van Gunten
The paperboat-heart is always careening toward drains
And the uncertain precipice
Desire might lead
To more
Suffering
Which is why one can follow it with such ease
The paper-airplane-heart just bounces off stuff
Can’t make a fixed
Landing
I am sleeping in a new duplex
Pandemic unsettling home for so many bodies
A mother moves into the empty unit next door
One sleepy afternoon, drifting in and out of consciousness,
I hear her humming
As she moves about her kitchen–
It’s like a memory
Drifting up as smoke would
A hummingbird builds a nest with cobwebs
And cottonwood fuzz
And loose bits of my hair
In the lilac bush in my new backyard
And lays a small egg
Exactly the size and shape of a jellybean
And then another a week later
Flitting in and out of the little knitted crown
In expert flight
It’s known
Hummingbirds will fly 500 miles over the ocean without stopping
And then finally sleep
In a kind of torpor
Tipping off the edge
Of a thin branch
Hungry for nectar and insects
I forgive the decorative heart when it fails in function
Can’t get to the end
Point
Like the diver forgives the pilot
Still clutching
at the plane’s controls
100 feet deep
In the ocean
We all know sometimes up is
Down
Each motion now is new
I pressed my pillow-mashed face to the heat
Of an afternoon
Ask for maps and helpers and familiars
A nest takes effort
Every fold is meticulous
Just one sweet small season
Before another breathtaking
Nonstop
flight
Georgianna J Van Gunten is a writer based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has an MFA with Vermont College of Fine Arts, and currently teaches creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She/her or they/them pronouns are preferred. A 2015 recipient of the Margaret Randall Poetry prize, publications include Gesture Literary Magazine, Le Petit Press, Semi-colon Press, Bombay Gin Literary Journal, et al. The writer was also named poet of the month for January 2020 at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe.
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