by Allison Field Bell

Peonies: the thickening bunch of them. Petals unfurling, gaping wide open to the sun. Pornographic the way they spread apart, their yellow centers. The way a heart is too. Its pumping. An organ so essential.

It’s called aortic stenosis. My mother is on the phone. She has a stiffening heart valve. I hear the word heart and panic. What it’s like to know how you’ll exit: I imagine heart attack. Heart pumping too hard, the muscle giving out. She says, Are you still there? How to answer. I’m thinking about the way to get to it, a heart: crack open the chest, butterfly the ribs. I imagine a carcass not a body. My mother’s. On a metal table. There are options. Open heart surgery. But a replacement valve only lasts so long. On the phone, she’s saying, It will be okay.

I stare down the irises in my backyard. Just yesterday, I was concerned with the angle of light hitting their pink flesh. How to capture an iris best. These photos—and photos of the peonies too—I was sending to my mother. Proud of the bed of their stalks, their intricate petals. So beautiful they hurt to look at it. A pale pink. Thin like her skin that bruises.

 I wonder now if that is a symptom. Blood pumping, blood pooling. I hate the word blood. The way it feels in my mouth. I want her alive. I want her stories. The ones where she dates cowboys and studies snails. My mother’s breathing on the phone. I imagine I can hear her heartbeat. Irregular.

I match my own breathing to hers. The way her body will break. I imagine my body breaking. My body, which is of her body. My mother. Her heart. Our breath: an embrace.

Allison Field Bell is originally from northern California but has spent most of her adult life in the desert. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Prose at the University of Utah, and she has an MFA in Fiction from New Mexico State University. Her prose appears in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, New Orleans Review, West Branch, Epiphany, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Superstition Review, Palette Poetry, RHINO Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com.