Sean Lyon
HOW A HEART
Tricia the three-toed sloth started to slipper my hand into her undergrowth.
“Wow,” I clickered, “I’m in love with this rainforest.”
Then she maffled her tongue down some other toucan’s throat. How a heart emflampers under such circumstances!
“O,” I lunkered, “The bananarama is cancelled, it’s over.”
I clambered up the stairs, my beak petricuckolded, clorping like a gaunt gibbous moon against each step on my sweltering accent to smither canopy. Just then an ocelot corrustickered my eye, slimmering over her tree-house-porch card table and trucing me hence with her manicured claws. I wallifer-fluttered, with all the agility of a milk frog whose leg’s been snippered by a plurching boa, to this ocelot’s treetop abode. She enfolded me. How a heart carditisizes under such circumstances!
“I’ve been at solitaire for too long, kid,” she volupurred, “Let’s get to know us better, what do you say?”
She crisply whurfed me in to a game of gin. We whiled the rainy season talking about grandmothers, our first bicycles, grub worms, plumage fashion and fur coats, horticulture, the lingering despondence of our previously stulfilcensed hearts, and our mutual distaste for gum fwaffter-plapquenmoppupfgurters.
After that, aloft in spirit and luck, I knorbt down on bended knorb and queried, “Vicenza, will you sollilify me?”
Vicenza’s repart was to fang the old cards in half and grinnel-smirk—a mouth of clubs, diamonds in her incisors, queens, kings, and twos peeking like bits of shining filling from the corners of her mouth.
“I’ll swindle a new deck,” I billet-douxed, “For the two of us.”
Sean Lyon received his B.F.A. in Writing and Literature from Emerson College in Boston. His poem, “Electrical Fire” is housed online at The Furnace Review. “How a Heart” is his first published work of fiction. A native Texan, Sean teaches, writes, and lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.
Read more from Cleaver Magazine’s Issue #4.
