Begged, Borrowed

by Helen Ogden

Lend me your heart Boy,
there is a gap, reeling. I do not
have my own, a thrumming thing,
that gathers and breaks, skittling.
Teach me to swallow down
what life throws. If I had a heart, beating,
ancient, I could take it. The swarming of
feelings, tattered wings, the turning of water,
the way the earth tastes of sorrow, and I sing,
I sing for one everyday.

Lend me your heart Girl, that sweeping
lilting muscle. The one you know
exists in there, while you scratch at your breastbone,
where it numbs a little, fingers tilt inwards
to muslin wrapped chambers. An unhealthy meat.
Give me this. Your surrendering hold.
I will not give it back, once tasted;
the whorls of a single betrayal.
Silt, blood, bone. Oh,
how the feelings grow.

---

Helen Ogden is a 28-year-old writer from Harrogate, England. She has previously been published in Iota poetry journal, Little Blue World, Gold Dust Magazine and Cabinet Des Fees, and will appear in the forthcoming fairytale anthology In The Telling from Cinnamon Press (May 2009). She is still writing her first novel, Of Scarlet, and studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. The poem that makes her think of cherries the most is "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti. "Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy, come buy..."

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