Human Arcs

My love is like the clown from Sesame Street who takes his make-up off backward with red, white, and black tubes and looks tired and stark when he starts and tired and stark and naked when he finishes 

But, 
My heart is like the perfectly healthy premolar that cracked to the root when I bit a carrot stick. The dentist said it was a very deep tooth, so the sides were too steep and, therefore prone to cracking. ACC is paying for a new one because I fell over carrying a yucca a few weeks earlier but I still feel like a scammer; it’s my tooth’s fault for not being built right
My heart constantly feels pressure similar to what the implant specialist applied to the half tooth still anchored in my head. I was unsedated, so my memory is accurate. I kept thinking about the bond between the broken tooth and my gum; how much fight there was to stay connected

But I, 
Afterward, I joked that the platinum screw will make my skull better looking to archeologists. Michael, the specialist laughed and said ancient Egyptians experimented with shell and bone tooth implants. ‘Oh they never worked’, he said, ‘but it’s still impressive’. I know my heart will also be found because it has calcified. I’ll leave instructions in my will for the cracks to be filled with gold, or hot glue gunned diamantes

But I still, 
My love is like a stupid fucking pen that lives in my bag and only works if you hold a finger on the back end when writing, so, actually, it doesn’t work. At every critical moment, I’ve needed a pen it’s been the only one there, and I’ve tried writing this three times with the pen now

But I still love,
My love is like the scandalously expensive refurbishment of 11 Downing St; fern wallpaper, eco-conscious rattan, and fabrics starting at 100 pounds a meter, ordered by the recent fiance of the recently divorced Prime Minister. Deeper down, the structural foundations of No11 were laid while slavery was legal, which was so profitable our ancestors took centuries to admit it was profoundly immoral. Evil. 
It’s been proposed the slow arc of the moral universe bends towards justice (I don’t pretend this is a fact). What if each human is an arc, and our decisions could be light and rain?

But I still love you,
I think of the way I loved you when it was last possible to say I love you without feeling like a fraud, without the horror of failing to protect you, and I want to curl up like a nematode in a human eyeball. The RNZ expert explaining nematode worms warned listeners to put our sammies down. I felt it then, now, and whenever I think of you or what happened, a pulse against the curve of my eyeball, something alive I can’t get rid of easily, bigger than it should be, with a will of its own, too foul to hear of while eating

But I still love you, kids

Simone Kaho

Simone Kaho is a writer, multimedia journalist, and poet who creates work at the intersection of politics, art, and storytelling. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters and has published two books of discontinuous narrative poetry, Lucky Punch in 2016, and HEAL! in 2022.