Heart The Size Of A Car

I wake up and it’s almost dark. I hear boom…boom…boom. I think it’s the raccoons jumping across the roof on their way to look for food. Maybe it’s the wind, the porch swing hitting the house, fireworks for some forgotten holiday or the war we've been waiting for but when I pull back the curtain on the window in the door, each rectangle of glass is a piece of your thumping heart, the size of a car, its feathery periwinkle veins like map-rivers, red finger-branches steady, wrapping down around the lower chambers, stamping the glass with tree patterns, knocking. Asking.

From Guest Contributor Brook Bhagat

Brook (she/her) is the author of Only Flying, a Pushcart-nominated collection of surreal poetry and flash fiction on paradox, rebellion, transformation, and enlightenment from Unsolicited Press. Her work has won contests and appeared in Monkeybicycle, Empty Mirror, Soundings East, Anthem: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen, and elsewhere. Two new collections, Exodus with Red Delicious and I Drink from an Ear: Real Ghazals, are forthcoming from Unsolicited Press in 2026 and 2027. She is a founding editor of Blue Planet Journal, the founder and facilitator of The Nearby Universe writers’ group, and a professor of creative writing at Pikes Peak State College.

Buzan

Buzan was an idiot-savant. His memory was prodigious, but he could not make use of the information he could recall. His parents discovered that he was an extraordinary pianist. He would play a piece through, having only heard it once on the family phonograph. He often “composed” pieces on the spot, some derived from the tones generated by the appliances in his mother’s kitchen, or his father’s shop. Most of his day was spent in the corner of the front porch playing rock, paper, scissors, by himself. The hours would fly by, and Buzan would nap on the porch swing.

From Guest Contributor, Thomas Pitre