“Heart to Heart” by Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14)

An excerpt from the essay, “Heart to Heart: Reading Melvin Dixon in an age of AIDS,” by Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14), published at Poetry Foundation:

 

Heart to Heart

2010: Short Breath. Fatigue.
It’s early on a Sunday morning in January of 2010. I sit on the edge of the bed, already dressed, with my hand on my partner’s foot as he sleeps. The night before, I couldn’t catch my breath, and I told myself that if I felt the same in the morning, I’d go to the hospital. I feel the same. My lungs are constricted. I pause a moment before waking my partner. I know that going to the ER means saying that this is real, this is an emergency. I thought it would all go away if I just waited. But it hasn’t, so I wake him up and say we need to go, and we do.

Heartbeats
The lines about breathing are what first draw me to Melvin Dixon’s “Heartbeats”:

Mouth wide. Drink this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.

No air. Breathe in.
Breathe in. No air.

The poem, included in Dixon’s posthumous collection Love’s Instruments(1995), comprises 20 couplets of four-beat lines that enact the regular rhythm of a heartbeat.  […continue reading here]