"OP Heart"

Loading the dryer, I think chocolate,
chocolate waiting in the heart shaped red box.
Luck winds around me like a static filled sheet,
an electric kiss. The washer, the dryer instead of rocks
and streams and wind. And chocolate, chocolate waiting
in the heart shaped box.
A hard heart, a cardboard heart with one piece left inside.
There's no assessing blame when it comes to love.
It won't change anything.
I've tried building a house of words,
laying them like bricks, row after row,
straightening them, aligning them just so,
my tongue as trowel, smoothing, making right.
It collapsed anyway when I was inside.
I was folding towels at the time.
The cardboard heart is simpler, gone is gone.
Yes, the heart is empty. I ate the last piece and left
the frilled brown paper wrapper sitting in the box.
For eternity, box and wrapper.
I'm matching socks when you throw them away.

Bio for Karen Mandell: I recently completed a novel, Repairs and Alterations, about an elderly tailor and his family secrets. I'd love to get it published. Currently, I teach writing at Mount Ida College in Newton, Massachusetts. I've been (or will be) published in doubledarepress, Slow Trains, Stirring, Poetry Motel, Samsara Quarterly, All Things Girl, and Small Spiral Notebook.