Holly Day

Strapped to her body, weighing not nearly enough
to make the sunrise it did when she hit
the mushroom cloud that lit up the desert for miles around
it would have been beautiful if anyone
had been left to see it.

She opened her eyes
just as the dots became cars on the road
people in the street
tiny, white blocks became buildings and houses
an end she did not want to see.

The wind dragged against her, but not enough
to stop her fall, just enough
to pull roughly at her hair, to open the top button of her shirt
with fingers as cold and rough as death.
It was like sunrise when she hit, if the sun
could erupt from the middle of the earth, instead of rising around the edge of it
could pour out of broken concrete like a an angry phoenix

this was the end she would never see.

he climbed inside me even though i told him i was
much too small, found a way to get under my skin
past the angry bones and red, wet flesh. there was not enough room
to move, but he did anyway.

i was a monk curled up in a cave
a book and a loaf of bread tucked against my chest, but then
i was the cave, and there was no room for god
there was no room for anything but angry, red flesh.

he moved against me like god and bread, like
monks and blood, like bones and books
ripped through my folder of soliloquies
took this flesh and made it read.

the flowers in the garden are screaming, screaming at the sun
morning glories uncurl, unfurl, split wide in their song
mouths and tongues laid bare against the pink of the morning light
an opera for the insects uncurling beneath the soil

leaves unfurling beneath the sudden lightness of evaporating dew
the vines rustle against the brick of houses in a clockwork tick
that follows the flickering sun as it moves across the sky
steady as the heartbeat of a pianist’s metronome

I waited for a week for the pens to arrive
anticipating the fantastic poems I would write
because, really, the best poems I ever wrote
were done with black gel pens, 20 years ago.

Poems festered in my head, unborn, but waiting
for those pens to arrive. It would be a literary
hurricane at my desk when those pens showed up
all the poems in me, trying to get out.

Another week passed and the pens still hadn’t arrived
hundreds of poems pushed against me, single words,
whole phrases, I could picture myself writing
in the back yard under the tree
I could picture it perfectly, but not without the pens.

When week three had passed, I started to panic
could feel poems from the weeks before fading, replaced by inferior ones
I called up the vendor, who couldn’t understand my panic
said he’d send out a new shipment—
it’d be here in a week.

she/I says
fuck you, pay attention to me
this, I am, we are
standing before you

invisible, the voices
never loud enough to be heard above
the tiny hole inside me filled
with screaming, you, you are

oblivious to the delicate flower
of my trembling heart
these frightened bloody clues I leave
spell L-O-V-E. always for you.