by Heidi Seaborn

To say your heart’s a hummingbird

is to say your heart beats

a thousand times a minute while flying thousands of miles,

wings whirring in milliseconds,

humming, homing.

When you speak of a racing palpitation,

I see your fear and yet,

it is not winged

or finned

or sprinting on paws or hooves.

It is weighted,

wearied

by millenniums

of walking

the earth,

eating

everything

in your

progress.

Once I could not dip my beak

into the full throat of honeysuckle.

Or

soar high into the cold Andes.

Over millions of years, I learned to adapt—my body,

a wonder of physics & evolution—

to still my hunger.

Listen to the white noise

of your anxious heart

humming

with the warnings of wildfire & hurricane.

Think of my vibrations as a signal

from another time

when we consumed

only the nectar needed & believed

we’d live forever.

Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. She’s authored three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry. Recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Financial Times, Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com