Harvesting the Heart
by Angela Narciso Torres
In Florida, I shall eat a palm seed and see if that’ll grow a new heart for me.
-D.H. Lawrence
Indeed, swallowing a seed seems the better option.
For stealing a palm’s heart from its solitary stem
is back-breaking work and spells certain death
for the tree. The part you can eat, otherwise known
as swamp cabbage, lobster of vegetables, or
burglar’s thigh, lies deep in the green trunk between
woody bark and where the fronds begin. You’ll need
a machete to work down the trunk, cutting away
fibrous layers one at a time, each about the weight
of a small child. You’ll want to give up after the third
or fourth layer. Don’t stop. Nearer the core it’s denser,
sap-drenched, and very tender. You’d be surprised,
despite how much you’ve uncovered—arms sore,
fingers splintered—the sheer size of that heart.
Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Book Literature Award/Poetry. Recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly. Her chapbook, To the Bone, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications and her second full length collection, What Happens Is Neither, from Four Way Books. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She resides in South Florida where she joins the 2020 Palm Beach Poetry Festival faculty as a manuscript consultant.
