GAS Featured Poet: Holly Day

 Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Slipstream, Penumbric, and Maintenant. She is the co-author of the books, Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies and currently works as an instructor at Hugo House in Seattle and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

 Outside

 

If I try hard enough, I can see myself standing outside

talking to neighbors, maybe going out for a beer.

We all smile at each other and wave as we pass

make plans to get together at the park with our kids.

I like seeing that version of me outside. 

I like seeing that version of my neighborhood. 

 

I sit on the deck and listen to the neighborhood children 

all playing in their back yards, squealing on the playsets

hastily erected by parents determined to shelter their families 

from being bored and isolated

 

they sound like they’re on vacation, I hope they think they are. 

 

 Blank

 

Then there was that one day when everyone who came to see the fortune teller

had a super short lifeline, like they were going to die in the same bus accident

or maybe an explosion, and she was so curious about the extent of the disaster

that she kept trying to read people’s palms even after she left her parlor.

 

But it’s hard to read people’s palms

when they’re carrying bags of oranges, their hands wrapped around loafs of bread.

It’s hard to find an excuse to make someone stick their hand out for a palm reading

when they’re fighting to get their kids in the car in the parking lot

or trying to make a phone call. 

 

And later, at the bar, where she usually ended her night

she could almost see the life lines of the people sitting in the next booth over:

the tall, handsome guy watching her from the bar through half-lidded slits, 

the bartender himself, his hand mostly obscured by washcloths and bowls of peanuts

almost, but not quite. Around closing, wobbling drunk, she decided

 

she’d probably just predicted the end of the world, that everyone’s hands

spelled doom and destruction and some horrible fiery end.

“I’m not going to read my own palm,” she said aloud as she fumbled with her keys

let herself into the front door of her home. “I’m not going to look

because I don’t want to know.”

 

 

 In the Merry-Go-Sorry

 

Time wobbles and stretches until the years don’t really mean anything

we’ve been friends for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, but nothing means anything

there are wives and husbands and lovers and distance that separate 

as time snaps like a rubber band and current events become bright and clear

for seconds that last longer than decades of correspondence. 

 

There are photographs that mean time has passed and when I find these pictures

it’s like a door opens in my heart and I’m there again, but it doesn’t mean anything

we are just two people who happen to remember each other’s names

for so many years we might as well be trees with placards nailed to our bark

we are just two people who can pick up a conversation dropped twenty years before

go on like no time or space ever separated us at all.