When We First


he gave me the new word, "love"
folded it into fourths, tore it to careful pieces of pink confetti.
I swallowed hard, felt it go down my throat

and although the pieces were so tiny, so small
I could still feel them somewhere inside me, 
halfway down, lodged and refused to move

I got the second word, "home," shortly afterward
the individual letters were illegible, as though someone else
had tried to swallow them before me
could only be reassembled through the process of

imagination. Some of the pieces of this new
disassembled puzzle
must have gotten stuck on their way down, 
because although I do believe the words are still there, inside me
something in me still doesn't understand what they mean.


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Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes in the Minneapolis school district. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Worcester Review, Broken Pencil, and Slipstream, and she is the recipient of the 2011 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published book is "Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch," while her novel, "The Trouble With Clare," is due out from Hydra Publications in 2013.

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