This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Teaching a Wild Thing by Kindra McDonald (Kelsay Books 2022).
EKG
For two long minutes
twice a day when I brush my teeth
with the electric toothbrush and its perfect
30 second interval pulses for each quadrant of my mouth
I think how it is the exact amount of time that you were dead
arrested on a hospital bed while a 4 foot nothing nurse straddled
you
and pounded your heart back to life. Now your pacemaker keeps
track of each beat
and somewhere in the sky a satellite watches it spike and dip, a
wave we ride, a grave we cheat.
Kindra McDonald is the author of the collections Teaching a Wild Thing, Fossils and In the Meat Years. She was the recipient of the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Poetry Award. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is a poet-artist working and teaching in mixed-media and found poetry. She served as the Poetry Society of Virginia Southeastern region Vice President from 2019-2022. You can find her in the woods or at www.kindramcdonald.com.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency. 
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