Echo

By Mary Fontana

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How many dictionaries’
worth of words have
we exchanged and they
taught me nothing, I
know now, having just
committed the whites
of your eyes, the nonsense
you uttered, to memory 
as we waited for the
ambulance to come,
as I waited. Now some
technician brandishing her
wand stands witness
to an architecture
that ought to remain
hidden, yours to 
disclose to none or 
one—yet here onscreen
it materializes. Now I’m
the one who can’t
breathe, it’s so
beautiful, my God: Venus 
flytrap gulping its
blood meal, cathedral
arches in cross-
section buttressed 
by lung, flaps of the mitral
valve high-fiving, over.
And over. And over. So
this is your 
heart: object of long
study. Only now, 
staring down the double
barrel as it loads
and fires, loads
and fires, words 
having failed us both, do
I know it fully.

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Mary Fontana is a scientist and writer who lives in Seattle with her parents, husband, two children, and eight-to-ten pet fish. She is currently writing a narrative history about the migrant house of hospitality where she has volunteered for the past 20 years. Her poems have appeared in journals including Prairie Schooner, The Seneca Review, The Seattle Review, Rust + Moth, and Moss. See her on Instargram at @maryfontanawrites.

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