“Sometimes I don’t know what our hearts are.”

Lying naked on my chest,
clean and smooth after a bath,
the sky a dusky cornflower blue.

“What’s in here?” Pearl asked,
tapping on my breast bone.

“That’s my heart,” I told her.
“You can hear it beating.”

She paused.
Some moments passed quietly.

“Your brain is in there?”

“No, my heart. Can you hear it?”

She listened again,
then lifted her head and looked at me.

“Sometimes I don’t know what our hearts are,”
she said.

I teared up.

“Sometimes I don’t know either,”
I told her.
“You don’t have to know. Just listen.”

And she fell asleep
to that ancient mama music,
the crickets outside keeping time.