Nicole inside her mother’s left ventricle

She isn’t certain how she ended up here, warm blood pulsing, the steady squeeze of her mother’s practiced heart hugging then releasing. She’d been away from Mom, living almost on her own, when she’d been attacked on the street on her way to work. Stabbed, she thinks, and carted off to the hospital. A couple of days before anyone thought to call her family. By that time the docs had given up. Evidently her mother hadn’t. So here she is, tucked into a corner of her mother’s heart. Alone. But not. When her mother talks, Nicole recognizes her tone even if the words don’t come through. She can tell when Mom is talking to her, sometimes sweet, other times angry. She hears her mother’s lungs fill and empty, feels the pull of her diaphragm. A sneeze halts everything for an uncertain moment before the swoosh and gush settle back to normal. Glad to exist at all, she doesn’t mind being back here, but she worries. What is this costing her mother’s body? Nicole knows that bits from heart or aorta can wash into the lungs and kill. She doesn’t dare let go her hold. She is making up a song with many verses.

Setting Up House

Nicole wants babies who will have babies. Wants a stream that loops lazy around her camp. She wants bees circling in her garden, returning and returning. She has taught the birds to sing canons, the sheep have chewed a labyrinth for her. Her step stones go down the garden and back up without beginning or end.  She thinks the irrigation ditch works so well because she dug it as an infinity sign. She’ll named her kids Return and Echo. Instead of saying, the children, she’ll call them her iterations.

Michigan poet, Lynn Pattison, is author of Matryoshka Houses (Kelsay Press, 2020) in addition to three other poetry collections: tesla's daughter (March St. Press); Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press) and Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press). She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times and for inclusion in Best Micro-fiction. Pattison’s work has appeared in Ruminate, Tinderbox, New Flash Fiction Review, The Notre Dame Review, Rhino, Brilliant Corners, The Atlanta Review, Smartish Pace and many other publications. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, most recently: Worth More Standing: Poets And Activists Pay Homage To Trees (Caitlin Pres, 2022) and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017).