Until There Is No Reason

I will rip the flesh from their thin, white bones, suck the red, wet meat
from between their fingers and toes, I will catch them when they’re
running from the house to the water to chase the tiny frogs that dart
velvet among the blue-green river rushes, the bright yellow marsh
marigolds, the thin brown stalks of  cattails and last year’s dead
 
floribunda. The layers of dirt and mud and smooth river rocks that separate
your/their world and mine/me will part like water, like air, like the thin
streams of fog that divide the land of the living from the land of the
dead. My hands will be real and will take them down with me,
kicking and screaming, as insubstantial and ineffectual as mist
 
themselves, my fingers entwined tendril-like in their fair hair, filling their ears
with my cilia and their skulls with my song. I will tell them all about the place
they will live now, and forever, with me, among the bright shards of crystal
that lie buried far beneath the earth, sparkling in the dark
 
where no eye can see. 


Holly.DayHolly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes for the Minneapolis school district and writing classes at The Loft  Literary Center. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Tampa Review, The Comstock Review, and the St. Paul Almanac, and she is the 2011 recipient of the Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published books are “Walking Twin Cities” and “Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch.”

 

 


 

Holly Day
Holly Day lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she teaches journalism, fiction, and publishing classes at the Loft Literary Center. Her published nonfiction books include Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, Guitar All-in-One for Dummies, Walking Twin Cities, and Insider’s Guide to the Twin Cities, and the poetry books The Smell of Snow (ELJ Publishing) and Night-Light Reading for Hardworking Construction Workers (The Moon Press).