Writings

No one wants to hear about broken hearts. Its cliché. We all know what it means and how it is. There have been songs and paintings and books. Since the beginning there has been this crumbling. There have been marathons run and new lives forged and hair cut and lonely empty streets walked and friends phoned and tear-stained pillow cases and long nights of dreaming and long nights of no sleep and days thudding along to the sound of it….ba bum, ba bum, bum, bum….the beat of a broken heart

is like a hollow broken drum

Never give your heart to a musician. Because they are like air, and will leave your heart like a broken drum. You’ll hear it in the seconds passing after he’s gone, on tour, chasing after new songs, new women to turn from songs into drums.

ba bum

Musician lovers are like wind passing in and out of a flute. Words are fast with them, and beware of any man who’s fast. They may like your ears, or your throat, the parts of you that make music when they play you. Don’t fall for those fingers with the little callouses at the tips from guitar strings, don’t fall for those hands arched over ivory keys, leaning into the notes.

Some things he saves only for his first love, a woman made of strings and ivory and sounds. He’ll stay up late at night with her, and you’ll hear of him only again through her, wailing, on a record, played later, in your apartment, all alone.

But its hard to escape sound, when its in the air, when you like the air, when you are made of air too.

You can feel sounds, too. You can feel the air and taste it and almost see it. You know the shape of air, the way it archs into clouds. Air carries things like flight, and that’s important.

You know the song of air and the look of it and the movement, and it is a bird. A bird in flight with feathers and arching movements and longings for the far-away. Maybe you were a bird once, or maybe you are a cat now, because you can’t stop watching birds.

The fast movements of their bodies and the duckling hair and how the softness of their feathers make the sharpness of their beaks easy to forget.

One day you begin collecting feathers. You wear them around your heart. One day you begin collecting boys with feathers and soaring voices and broken wings. Something broken about them makes your heart stop

ba bum

and you want to save them. You pick them up and carry them home. You wear them around your heart. You play them like a drum. You walk them along city streets and believe in their sweet songs and pet the soft duckling hair along their necks and nurse them with the best of you.

You nurse them. You sing to them and of them. You give them some of your flight, little by little, in a small plastic spoon over the sharpness of their beaks till you forget about their sharpness and their brokenness, and forget you were trying to make them better in the first place. You begin thinking they will always stay in your nest with you, that way,

you two….

singing and building.

Your song is his song and his song is your song. And you begin to forget about the air around you and only remember the air of your songs and what that means.

And then one day when you are out buying groceries he flies away.

And there is no air without him. Your heart is the sound of percussion, a lead foot hitting the floor, a wooden stick beating something’s old skin.

Sarah Herrington is an accomplished poet and fiction writer. Her poetry appears in the anthology Bowery Women alongside writers such as Sapphire and Anne Waldman, and her fiction in the upcoming book Just Like A Girl. She has published work in dozens of print and online journals including SmallSpiralNotebook, Poetry Motel, and Altar Magazine. Sarah has worked in the editorial departments of Scholastic, Inc, Viking Children’s Books, and for New York City’s largest Creative Writing school, Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Sarah currently works with Girls Write Now, teaching and mentoring teenage girl writers. She is a regular reader at the Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street Café, Halcyon, St Marks Poetry Project, and other venues. Her poem-videos have appeared on YouTube, and she has been featured in Venus Zine. She received her degree in English and Creative Writing from New York University. Sarah lives in New York City and online at www.sarahherrington.com.

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