"Poetry" by Holly Day
My husband storms angrily into the kitchen and tells me
he’s had another nightmare that I was writing poetry
that I was sending off stacks and stacks of envelopes
spending excessive amounts on postage and mailing supplies
to pursue my worthless ambitions. “You seem to think
you’re going to live forever,” he tells me at the end of his story
“that you can keep taking these little steps towards nothing
while people out there are working themselves to death.
It seems like a smart person would have figured things out
given up by now.” But I’m still stuck on this nightmare he’s had
of me writing poetry—and not of me
stabbing him in his sleep, or running away with another man,
or forgetting to feed or even completely abandoning our children
all things my subconscious has terrified me with
all the things that send me running to my desk in the middle of the night
to exorcise with poetry, this terrible thing I do.
"When the Landlord Came" by Holly Day
they came and told us we had to leave and we
said fuck it, we’ll go. we packed up all the things
that made our lives bearable and buried the rest
in a hole in the forest, where bears could dig them up
maybe use them to build their own new society.
my husband cut us each a spear, his from a broom, mine from a mop
we went deeper into the forest. I cut the heels off my shoes
used them as weights for our curtain-tie
fishing nets. It wasn’t long before we had food. Our children
learned to make rabbit snares from breadbox lids
how to drop unexpectedly from an overhanging
tree branch, how to make fire. We experimented with different
types of shelters, finally settling in a tipi of old coats
wool suits draped over felled telephone poles and braced
with old kitchen appliances, make-up cases with broken hinges, busted clock radios
all the things that had made our lives easier
in a past we could no longer remember.