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Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review. Her newest poetry collections are Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), and The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press).
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Zaire
Yesterday is a river that swallows all rivers.
Everything that came before this morning is part of the same
itinerant body of water. There’s no need to keep track.
I emerge from yesterday washed clean
of everything that came before, brand new, I insist
that we treat this person I am as a brand new me with no past
no past at all.
There is an island in the Amazon
strewn with the bodies of discarded dolls
offerings to some child long gone. I imagine
you’d like to make offerings to a similar child in me
some ghost child you can blame for tantrums
the way I talk in my sleep when I’m scared.
In my dreams, I am suffocating all of the ghosts
that keep me from being a brand new person,
a person without a past. I hold their wide-eyed faces
down in the water until the bubbles stop.
I insist on a new name every day.
I will only answer to these new names until
all of the old parts of me are gone.
*****
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Shadows on the Wall
Just like in the beginning, it’s people who have to do all of the grunt work.
Baskets full of seeds and tubers are passed out with unnecessarily explicit directions
for planting. Some of the seeds will grow into trees and flowers
while others will grow into crops and animals. No one asks
where the people came from—they’re just there, ready to take orders
from the gods of creation, whether they be in the shape of giant spiders
or wolf-headed men, or faceless commands from the void.
It’s people who always do the work in these stories.
When the world ends, perhaps these same people will materialize
to wander through the wreckage, picking up the mess,
carefully collecting seeds from trees, flowers, animals and buildings
put each remnant into a plastic bag for storing, carefully labeling the future
with the black Sharpie pen.
*****
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Image: Pixabay
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