Move the Back of Your Heart Towards the Front of Your Heart
On Saturday, July 21, PEN American hosted poets Janaka Stucky and Ana Božičević at the second annual New York City Poetry Festival. Below, read Stucky’s poem “Move the Back of Your Heart Towards the Front of Your Heart,” from The World Will Deny It For You, out now on Ahsahta Press, and listen to a recording of him reading the poem at the festival.
Move the Back of Your Heart Towards the Front of Your Heart
We have become
White-blooded people of the future
Let me show you pictures of the man
I was when I was
Other than the man
I am right now
I have always wanted to be looked at
The way you look at me when I move
The back of my heart toward
The front of my heart
The parenthesis of light
Along your eye’s rim
Unbuttons me to the crescent shore of now
I break upon each time I land
At last
The solace of the world’s worst thing