The First Heartbeat
doesn’t splash down,
a space capsule
blinking its beacon
to be found.
What warmth it bodes
derives from swarms;
cells converge to thrum
a rhythm.
I think of yours
and think of crowds,
sourceless and surging
through a cross-
walk, the footsteps
thickest beneath
the stoplight’s bleating.
That apex
bears the largess
of everywhere
we’ve traveled. You hold
whole cities.
To dip an ear
into these notes
then tip our heads back
and float un-
fastened—thank you
midwife, thank you
“fetal Doppler”—melts
us, mute now
as the novice
astronomer
who—scoping our dark,
cosmic start—
yearns to brush knees
with a stranger.
Your broadcast broadens
our tiny
kingdom. We ask,
for now, just this:
let us never hear
your last one.
Derek Mong
“The First Heartbeat” is from The Identity Thief by Derek Mong, published by Saturnalia, September 2018. Reprinted with permission.
Poet, essayist, translator, and scholar Derek Mong is BKT Assistant Professor of English at Wabash. His collaborative translations—with his wife, Anne O. Fisher—of Russian poet Maxim Amelin won the 2018 Cliff Becker Prize. Identity Thief is his second book of poetry.