Sasha Fletcher
MY HEART IS AN ICE FLOE AND IT WILL WRECK YOU
We were sitting in the kitchen making dinner
when the radio told us how polar bears
were slowly moving across the arctic circle, headed
inevitably towards warmer climates
and our still-beating hearts, which call out to them
like an all-night buffet. I told you
No polar bear is going to eat the still-beating heart
of the woman I love as long as I live
and you said that that was really sweet
so I dove into the sea. Eventually
I found myself in the Arctic. It was cold
so I put on a sweater. I lay down on the ground
with my mouth open and I waited. When a polar bear came by
I closed my mouth down around its leg
and I said Now you are trapped
and the polar bear bled all over my face and died.
I built a home in the polar bear’s stomach
and I built a fire in my home in the polar bear’s stomach
and walked on out of that home with a year’s supply of dinner.
That night I was surrounded
by a pack of polar bears seeking vengeance.
I fled across the ice and commandeered an iceberg
with which I set sail for your smiling face
until I shipwrecked some sailors. There I was
adrift in the Arctic, surrounded
by the broken bodies of shipwrecked sailors
every one of them weeping and bleeding and begging to die,
so I built a ship from their bones and off I went
into the sunset with the wind at my back
and that ship just cried and cried. I asked the ship to stop that.
I said Stop that. Nobody cares about your sadness
I sang to the ship and it cried and it cried
and a children’s choir five hundred strong joined in
and we all sang out Nobody cares about your sadness
and we all kept singing
until the sky broke open and the curtain dropped
and the broken hearted wives of the shipwrecked sailors
drowned us in applause.