Two Poems

by Holly Day

Longing for the Tropics

I miss the birds, most of all—it’s an amazing thing

to see egrets splashing
in run-off ditches, nesting
in low-hanging
cypress boughs

by the side of the interstate, as

if they planned for
their young to integrate into civilization
right at birth. I miss the wild animals
even more,

raccoons and possums and wild alley cats living

together beneath the crumbling buildings
dolphins surfacing unexpectedly at the
shallow end of the bay. If I could
find some way to live

there all alone, with no other people

around me, where no one could find me
find a hidey-hole in the roots
of an old hollow tree
to burrow down into
and sleep, undisturbed

I might move back.

Revelations in the Dark

I’ve heard

sometimes prisoners in solitary
grow so lonely they tame
spiders, lure them to their cells by
plucking single
hairs from their heads and playing them like
guitar strings
mimicking

the sound of a mother

spider calling out
to her children
by tapping on her web

if the memory

of some
warm
comforting mother-spider figure could
make a spider like that one
staring at me
from the dark corner of my room
come running like a tardy child
expecting dinner

 

how awful and terrifying can it really be?

 

Bio: Holly 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 Hawai’i Pacific Review, Slant, and The Tampa Review, 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."