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 Review, and Bathtub Gin. She organized the Poets 4 Unity monthly reading series in Bloomington, Indiana, in response to Election Day 2016.
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 Review, and Bathtub Gin. She organized the Poets 4 Unity monthly reading series in Bloomington, Indiana, in response to Election Day 2016.