Threshold

Threshold

for my -x

The doctors repair your mitral valve, a door
in your heart needing a shim or tightened hinge.
They stop your heart to heal you, mechanical
pumps offering breath and blood, the way I now
keep my love for you outside myself. How
can the draining be a harbor? You are a door
I walked through willingly. We cannot never
have entered those rooms we’ve entered. It’s done.
Nightclub, sacristy, cabin, school gym, hospice,
law office, old house, new home. And what of all
those doors of the body: ear, mouth, nostril, vulva,
venous, sphincter, lymph. When they bring you back
in through the OUT door, the rooms of my body flood
and our life rushes back, a coursing of cooled blood.

Writer, artist, and educator, Kelly Cass Falzone, earned her MFA in Poetry from Spalding University in Louisville, KY, and MSEd. in Counselor Education from SUNY Brockport. Her work appears in journals such as Good River Review, Stone Canoe, Literary Accents, Nashville Arts Magazine, Clackamas Literary Review, and The Journal of Poetry Therapy, and has been awarded recognition from the Bea Gonzales Prize for Poetry, Porch Prize in Poetry, Libba Moore Gray Prize in Poetry, Berry College Emerging Southern Women Writers Competition, Chattanooga Writer’s Guild, and Tennessee Writer’s Alliance. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.