Exploding Head Syndrome

You are finally an adult and living with roommates in a house with a rickety banister and soft spots on the floor beneath the wrinkled carpet when your head begins exploding at night. First, there is a swish like a heavy wing dragging at the air and then, the door slams. Where does one life end and another begin? When you were a child, your thumb or your mother’s thumb was slammed in a car door. One of you felt the pain, and one of you the guilt. But you cannot remember which was which. You dreamed of a guilt so grave you fell to your knees in the garden beside your parents’ house. Tadpoles in the creek down the hill shuddered in their cool, leafy beds. What have you done? Once, a red balloon sailed to the high ceiling of a warehouse, and though the ribbon slipped from your or your sister’s fingers, you cannot remember which, you know the empty hand, you know the battering heart of regret. In your dreams, you are always running from the shadow that chases you through the forest. At night, an owl screams a womanly, murderous scream. Neighbors call the police. You and your sister and your mother set out with the dog and a flashlight and find nothing. 

Heart Opener

If you push your heart toward the world, it will fly out of your chest toward the sky and be ruined forever. Yours is the heart that snarls in a tree. Not delicate like a kite ribboned in a blossoming branch but a lump wedged like a nest of squirrels, a bloody scene. There is too much at stake. At night, your daughter sleeps in a taut line, the slip of her satin nightgown, the latent velocity of a bird mounting the wind with closed wings. You, leaning over to kiss her hot forehead still smelling of the summer sun, hollow your body around your heart like a net with a trapped animal inside. Across the room, in its dark tank, the tadpole sleeps with eyes open, pushing hopeful, transparent legs away from its body as if to feel for the mud that awaits him at the water’s edge, kissing at the water in search of air to inflate the lungs currently blooming inside him. You know you will have to open your heart and ready yourself for the hard losses coming. Even the day will come that your daughter, on her pale lean legs, steps into the distant forest, drops off the horizon of the farthest road, and nothing will stop her leaving you for the world. You will grow old and leave her in turn. The skin of your arms already blotched by the sun like your mother’s. You will lose everything. The frog turns a mottled prairie green and eventually must be released to the pond. Clouds suspended in black water will be swept away by the ripples marking his arrival. Everything escapes your useless grasp. But for now, the broken lobbing of your worried heart is contained in this room with the wooden blinds snapped shut. For now, your daughter turns and balls herself beneath the covers. Whatever she dreams, she pulls her knees close to her chest. That’s your girl. A lavender ruffle peeks from the beneath the quilt.   

Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, as well as the chapbook Her Human Costume. Hoffman is a former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Director’s Guest at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Fence, Blackbird, diode, Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.