This week’s poem, Suzanne Langlois’ “Fact Check” celebrates a heart that resists all limits. I love this loose sonnet’s strong voice and leaping line breaks, and how its meditation steadily builds to its climactic paradox.
Langlois’s chapbook “Bright Glint Gone” won the 2019 Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance chapbook award. Her poems have recently appeared in Whiskey Tit, Rust + Moth, Cider Press Review, and Menacing Hedge. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and teaches high school English in Falmouth.
Fact Check
By Suzanne Langlois
Your facts are useful, and yet, they are not my dwelling.
-Walt Whitman
My heart refuses to live in my heart,
refuses to live in the fact of my body.
It keeps flying the coop with its bumble
bee wings. Each day, my heart lifts a body
too heavy for its strength, a body so
in love with gravity, it weighs three times
what it weighs. Weight is both a number and
a value. A number is a fact that builds
a fence around a space and says no one
can enter and no one can leave, but
my heart is a burrowing creature. It has
tunneled out of more traps than it’s been
confined to, which should be impossible,
but my heart will not dwell in the possible.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Fact Check” copyright © 2020 by Suzanne Langlois, is reprinted from Bright Glint Gone (Pink Eraser Press). It appears by permission of the author.
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