Issue 2: embodied
An issue with the heart
jessica bebenek
It is an issue with the heart The Doctor said and lifted my dress to encircle my breast with eight clammy urchins of electrodes nothing to see here He said and lowered a stack of grainy-inked forms mind this will expire in three months’ time He said I’m here for you to see me I said lifting my dress high above my breasts exposing myself to Him supraventricular tachycardia He said next morning in the emergency room after the intravenous Ativan had worked its slippery bulbous magic and drew four globular forms on the striated print-out of my heart here He said is where you produce too much power one extra impulse which throws the whole beast off
and suddenly on the ultrasound screen, there you are Dear Heart it’s you pressing your pressing your tips of praying hands to tips and apart again soft anemone of my living trace smeared upon the crumbled screen I watched you keeping what’s me alive I cried before him I’m sure you see this all the time I said
Look here He said unexceptional slapped down perfect peaks and valleys why did you overproduce then and perform properly now why have you wasted institutional time in a windowless room in a room in the belly of a crumbling brown and cream hospital ever-being-constructed the prussian blue cursive embroidered letters on his white coat winking at me who will be following you He said You I said or not You I can’t tell His white coat flickering out the doorframe He said we will enter you here and here indicating the artery in my groin the artery in my neck you will be shaved or you may shave yourself a catheter will be inserted and cameras fed through you but probably we’ll find nothing He said what do you think we should do? Now? I said No He said you will receive a call in time He said but once we’re in we can burn it off What off? I said He said the extra impulse
I shook my curls in the slow sweet No of a novice with issues of the heart his white coat flickering out the doorframe in time he said who will be following you he said you I said it has always been you
Love as Instinct
jessica Bebenek
As I sat on the boat launch’s rotting timber, the evening sun shining
in sheets through clouds like a postcard of God, I watched
a single loon, smooth and dark-headed, bobbing with two fuzzy chicks
so small they disappeared behind waves torn-up by the wind.
As I watched, they tipped back their glossy head to the sky
and called-out a steady siren, a wailing bark across the lake, and listened
as the reply, a perfect echo, grew each time louder, then visible
as their partner landed and, with a great slapping splash and stretch
of their speckled wings across the coarse face of the lake, rejoined.
One and then the other, and then together, they laughed,
tossing back and shaking their shining heads,
the haunting chime of their bells in tandem now ringing
over the silent, teeming, sun-capped lake.
When they each rose from their dives, hunting minnows or weeds,
I don’t know, and mouthed them, each, to their chicks in easy motions,
then down again for more—who, then, disguised this love as an instinct?
Who looked away from the broad, obvious surface of the lake and cited
simply hormonal firings? As if the loons were oblivious to why they sang or hunted,
or as if we aren’t. Or as if our love is anything more than an impulse, a series of actions—
a calling-out, a laugh, a bringing of mouth to mouth.
Jessica Bebenek is an interdisciplinary poet, bookmaker, and educator currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). Bebenek’s writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize, twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and in 2021 she was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Her recent work can be found in Humber Literary Review, Canthius, Ampersand Review, and Vallum. Her seventh poetry chapbook, I REMEMBER THE EXORCISM, was published in 2022 by Gap Riot Press. Her first full-length poetry collection, No One Knows Us There, will be published by Book*hug Press in 2025. IG: @notyrmuse www.jessicabebenek.art