It’s a pocket watch, right? Is it a regular heart or puny for your size? Is it notched like a measuring cup so you know what you’ve got left or what’s been spent? If you knew its half-life, you’d know when you had to get serious about your health. Thirty? Forty? Is it an open heart? Can you unfold it like an old highway map to see where you’ve been and then refold it? That’s the tricky part, to get it back just the way it was, once it’s been consulted. You’d have to be Michael DeBakey to do that. Or a trucker, urging his heart into the sleek night with caffeine, cigarettes, and speed. Who’s going faster, him or the truck? Only God can make a paper crane of your heart or a little boat or a cup; it could hold so much more if its volume were greater. If it wasn’t so hard to become a saint, I could push my heart in a wheelbarrow in the rain until its great thirst was quenched. What your heart believes, you believe, thermometer or weathervane, never a pump because your heart likes to believe it’s more whimsical than it is. If your heart retires, it might come back like Tom Brady, but it won’t have the confidence that comes with being immortal.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s

new chapbook is The Vaudeville Horse (Etchings Press, 2022). Her first full-length book of poetry, Dominant Hand, is available from Mayapple Press, and she is co-author with artist Mary Hatch of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018). Other books by Kerlikowske include The Shape of Dad (a memoir in prose poems), Last Hula (winner of the 2013 Standing Rock Chapbook Competition), and Chain of Lakes.

She has been publishing her poetry and fiction for more than 40 years in such journals and magazines as Encore, Cincinnati Review, Passager, and Poemeleon, among others. Recent poems have appeared in New Verse News and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

Her work is also anthologized in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016); The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women (Shade Mountain Press, 2015); two of the annual KYSO Flash anthologies, Accidents of Light (2018) and Earth Hymn (2019); and in the Michigan writers anthology published by Western Michigan University (WMU).

Formerly an arts activist, Kerlikowske was president of the Poetry Society of Michigan, and she served for 30 years as president of the Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry. She’s retired from a teaching career at Kellogg Community College. Recently, she took a project years in the making to a gallery, and the show opens on 22 August 2023.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ If my grandfather walked toward me with two arms, I wouldn’t recognize him, micro-CNF by Kerlikowske in Issue 11 of MacQ (January 2022); nominated for Best of the Net 2023

⚡ Into the Oak, prose poem by Kerlikowske in MacQ-9 (August 2021)

⚡ Three in Prose by Kerlikowske in DIAGRAM (Issue 5.1): “Forty Winks”; “The Girls’ Room”; and “Midway”