HEARTBEAT

There’s an expression my partner revisits
often since our son was born:
To have a child is to feel my heart beat
outside my chest.

I feel this way
when I retrieve his red wagon
and he runs
the opposite direction.
God, how he runs.
A peel of laughter, because he knows he shouldn’t.
His heart pounding with the motion
and the glee of freedom
and misbehavior
and looking back
to see me run, too.

My heart pounds in pursuit.
I abandon the wagon on the sidewalk to reach him
just as he reaches the curb
to cross the street toward home.
He knows the way.

I carry him back to the wagon
try to explain
running isn’t a game.
Try to explain
how my heart might’ve stopped
if he’d made it off the curb,
if there’s been a car.
He laughs each time we make eye contact
residual adrenaline or
the memory of his run
too fresh in his mind.
He doesn’t have language to follow all I say.
Least of all, as I descend through
subjunctive layers.
He doesn’t have language to respond
past relaxing his body
as I set him in the wagon.
He lets me pull his steadying heart
home.

WEIGHT

It’s a point of guilt
that I didn’t carry my son’s body.
I carry him now when he doesn’t
need, but wants it,
while he pulls on my beard hairs.

I saw him first.
His mother recalls me, teary-eyed
As the mid-wife counted down from ten,
the intervals his mother pushed.
Everything in the room was a sterile white
except for the back of his head,
falling free and heavy,
dark hair matted and alive.

I saw him first.
Fall in love like this
and you lose track
of the height you fell from.

I remember a science lesson
about objects of the same shape
falling at the same rate
regardless of the weight they carry.
So it was we
fell, fell, fell.
Fall long enough without hitting ground
and who’s to say we aren’t flying?

Michael Chin grew up in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He has published three short story collections and, most recently, his debut novel, My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours (Cowboy Jamboree Press 2021). Visit miketchin.com.