By Karen Pojmann

Featured Art: Looking Back by Madelyn Bartolone

If my heart breaks loose and
darts across a lawn—if,
stopped at crossroads,
my heart pries my ribs apart,
takes wing through the open
car window—if my heart
gets away from me—
help me bring it back.
Walk with me, hedge to hedge,
with a butterfly net,
a baseball glove,
a sauce pan. We’ll crunch
over cicada husks, duck
the sprinklers, race
the coming dusk.
When we spot it, cupped
in a daylily or
tangled in chain link, by then,
relieved and grass-stained,
we’ll be laughing and crying
and the streetlights will be just
starting to sputter above us.

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Karen Pojmann is a writer, editor, and communications director living in Columbia, Missouri. Her poems have been published in The Madison Review, Writer’s Digest, Helen, Belletrist, Literary Mama, Mom Egg Review, and the Lascaux Review’s Lascaux Prize anthology.