The Hard Hearted

The Hard Hearted
Levi Rogers

There is a rock in my chest
Just next to my lungs
And when I reach inside
and touch
I feel only the cold steel
Of an abandoned warehouse.
The arteries in my arms are pumping steel
My veins are petrified petals in a vase:
Feel.
The only thing that could make this harder is a train
Barreling down in repeat. Until
The purple of
this petal becomes
As gray as railroad tracks.

When you hardened Pharaoh’s heart
Did he have any choice?
And when you reached inside and turned it cold
Was there anything to do but fold,
and let it go.
When he faced the Israelites
And more than wanting them to stay he just didn’t care at all.
And when his army died did he even blink an eye, or was the sea that covered them as red and dense as
the rock inside your chest?

Do you harden hearts to make a point?

Because there is the distance the size of Russia
between here (my mind) and here (my chest beating muscle)
and it forms like black nights of stars that sparkle planetariums on the
back of my eyelids.

I see pharaoh’s insides wrapped in iron
There’s a bullet proof vest on his ventricles
As Moses fires round after round—to no avail.
And if you lined him up,
Lined me up, only a firing squad would do, and even then (just barely.)
But I hear there’s a man who can turn these ice rocks into warm apple pies
And I’m wondering if you’re this man,
or the man who takes pies to form stones
Lodged like thorns in our bones.
a numb whole in my face that reads, “Insert Bones here” with an arrow.

When you hardened Pharaoh’s heart did you give him any choice?

And if so we’ll shout “escape is futile!” the only hope that’s left is a rock quarry.
Maybe we can find a softer stone.

But on eleven o’ clock on Wednesday night I saw the moon with a halo through the skeleton branches of a tree with the clouds stitched in the sky like patchwork farms. And the only place I want to be right now
Is home.