February’s facts on truth, justice, planets—her maps of the world
filled the family room along with the Valentine hearts
that chizzly winter, 25 below in Minnesota.
A friend penned under a sunrise he drew, “This Dawn
keeps coming up!” The third time told she’d die,
she couldn’t plan on it, decided to live

as long as she could, told Bess she’d always live
within her daughter’s heart; even if the world
were a deep freeze, there’d be a warm spot if she’d die,
there in the left side of the chest, the heart.
I can’t get used to the world without Dawn,
can’t imagine without her there could be any Minnesota.

We had our biggest blow-up over Minnesota,
rather over whether she’d stay there to live
out the illness. She was one stubborn sister, Dawn,
though she’d prefer the word “determined.” It was her world,
her friends, her job, she spat at me while her heart
stayed the course, a very rough terrain, until she died.

Meanwhile, we all ganged up on death,
the family commuting from Ohio and Colorado to Minnesota.
And Bess was learning facts about the heart
from Seemore Skinless, a computer character who lived
with us as she learned the lessons of the world,
both organ and abstracts, the condition of her mother, Dawn.

Years before, broke and abandoned, Dawn,
whose beauty, like all things of beauty, never died,
bought a slim-skirted suit and took on the world,
arriving full of plans for the new job in Minnesota,
her thick brown hair flowing, her eyes and voice alive.

Today another voice on my answering machine: “The heart,
says Seemore, is five inches round, Aunt Di.” It’s Bess in Colorado
with her new parents, as Dawn willed it if she couldn’t live
with Bess in this world, if she could only live, as she does, in our hearts.