I know I have a fickle heart and a bitterness and a wandering eye and a heaviness in my head
by Ana Rodriguez Machado
after Adele
it was easier when I
took wild city geese for granted, didn’t know
where sky ended and I
began, the poem was complete, we didn’t have
a single mythic beginning between us, a-
head of ourselves, aware of each other, fickle
in the way birds can be fickle, your heart
a single seed, mine a rushing white water with and-
alusian sensibilities, another way to fly, we were a-
wake in each other’s empty bellies, bitterness
swallowing us up, I didn’t know any better, and
the story always went the same: a
family inside a suitcase, a girl wandering
inside empty cupboards, an eye
for melancholy, a remembering and
(of course) a forgetting, a
pending heaviness
we did not account for in
our flight path, our ocean depth calculations, my
silly promises, the sheer weight of my head
Ana Rodriguez Machado is a Cuban diaspora poet and writer living in Toronto, Canada. Her poems have been published in PRISM international, The Malahat Review, The Humber Literary Review, and The Capilano Review, and have been finalists for the CBC Poetry Prize, PEN Canada's New Voices Award, and The Mahalat Review Far Horizons Prize in Poetry. She earned an MFA from the University of Guelph. You can find her online at anaro.ca.