The Heart Remains by Hiromi Yoshida My heart was a broken compass again—this time, propelling me away from Annie’s memorial service site down Walnut Avenue—till I begged diners at a Chinese restaurant for GPS directions, (I was a bicycling buzzard) my own lunch their sympathetic fortune cookie hearts (paraphernalia of necessity). My vigil candle refused to light up among the others at the Unitarian Universalist Church, but when I stood at the pulpit to read “Fishtailed Cherub,” the afternoon sun flowered into radiance—rekindling within me Bloomington’s communal love, and my heart was a fixed compass (no longer the dull feast of buzzards), and Lotus bloomed before us all, curling red petals into the warm Bloomington night. Hiromi Yoshida is a winner of multiple Indiana University Writers' Conference awards. Her poems have been published in The Asian American Literary Review, Indiana Voice Journal, Evergreen Rev...
Flying Island is the Online Literary Journal of the Indiana Writers Center, accepting submissions from Midwest residents and those with significant ties to the Midwest.