A review of “Heart” by David James Poissant, published in Cincinnati Review

The best microfiction walks a precarious tightrope between prose poetry and storytelling. Teeter too far to one side and you end up with flights of pure language and metaphor, possibly beautiful, but a better fit for a poetry chapbook. Too far to the other and you’ve compressed a story into a tiny space without the payoff, sacrificing language to make what should be a longer work fit small.

David James Poissant’s “Heart” sits in that magic zone so perfectly you don’t see the punch coming. It has the repetition, the fragmentation, the slightly sentimental slightly surreal tone, and—most of all—the flow of a poem, while maintaining the cadence, momentum, and plot of a complete story.

In fact, it manages to capture two different kinds of stories into its ~500-word length. It begins as a drinking game between friends, the quick pace of several voices allowing a rapid iteration of metaphors about memory and perception. It slips next into an actual memory rather than an imagined one, less whimsical and more emotional, a tone shift that intentionally clashes against the boisterous setup. And, finally—wham!—that ending. Instead of worrying about spoilers, just go ahead and read it. It’s microfiction; it won’t take long. Though, in retrospect, the title did tell you where it was heading.

What makes a story work, especially one of this length, especially one that crams together two narratives that don’t quite go together on the surface? As always, it’s the threading underneath. Both halves explore what it means to perceive life through other people’s bodies. In particular, our parents’ bodies, and how memory can be a physical weight that gets passed down to us.

As readers, we don’t always consciously notice thematic subtext, especially on a first pass, but we sense it. Stories feel more complete and satisfying when that connective tissue is quietly guiding us.

Read this way, the tonal shift sharpens the point. The first half treats bodies and memory as abstractions, borrowed in the search for experience at a remove. The second half closes that distance. What initially feels playful and speculative is devastatingly revealed to be intimate and unavoidable. The story doesn’t reconcile its two halves by smoothing them together, but by letting them press against each other. It tells us the memory of our parents (and our parents’ memories) is an inheritance we cling to no matter how small. Sometimes all our parents leave us is a kind of microfiction of its own.

Gewgaws:*

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*Gewgaws are like Michelin stars, but better cause they're for short fiction.
1 is great; 2 is exceptional; 3 is perfect.