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22 Dry Heart God, why did you give me such a dry heart? I think it must have been to help me live in that house where the heart must be wrung, in those years when I had to listen to everyone. A dry heart taking nothing in. I learned to say that I belonged to nothing. But now I’m old; the people who hurt me are gone, gone into the dark, and you have forgiven them— that’s right, I know, I knew you would forgive them, but my heart you have not redeemed. God, I have no heart. Why did you take my heart? My heart that held its sorrow like baked earth, my dry heart that refused to break or fail, that waited out the seasons, patient, taking only a little air. This muscle struggling inside me now, thrashing the bone cage, is not my real heart. It is an animal choking at the end of a rope, a bird that batters its wings against stone, and falls, and returns. Something wild and fierce, desperate, and damned. ...

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