HEARTBLEAK
A headline tidily told
a familiar story about
a community’s feeling
after deadly violence.
In the big-type words,
I mistook heartbreak
as heartbleak at first.
Such a rough emotion.
This world can pummel
us like the fertile topsoil
weather-whipped to leave
only blood and bleakness.
My desperate heart a horse
grazing on dust if needed.
RADIOACTIVE CONFESSIONAL POETRY
I have told you my writing does not instigate
sharing things that I don’t need to confess,
but this morning when you called to let me
know you were coming home after a week
away at your parents’ house, you woke me
from a dream in which I was all sealed up
in protective gear while warily measuring
radiation fallout at a power plant mishap.
I can’t remember if we were both there.
After I groggily told you to have a safe trip,
I touched my chest and it felt hot and so
I wondered at first if I was sick and then
I pondered why I didn’t refer to what
I had been dreaming as a nightmare and
I waited hours for you to arrive home as
I kept listening for the Geiger counter that
I knew would never detect a safe space for us.
Biographical Statement
Ronnie Sirmans is an Atlanta print newspaper digital editor whose poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, The South Carolina Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Plainsongs, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.