Click play to listen to Holly read her poems to you
The Last Porch Sit
Chair
They’re not bedsores if it’s not a bed
Spoonfed
I feel dolled
& nightmare about
a piebald suit
of old curtains
I Dread
The afterparts
When they’ll weep
how good I was
Undecorated
I turn
nice to the bit
family visits
nearly at home
the hours
dark with paper
Shame
Reeva smoked & hung chimes.
I climbed on the shoulders
of her lawn jockey painted over
entirely a neutral-to-warm red.
She said I could be a model.
Taking a drag, she told me
her husband drifted unsure
how to come home after a walk.
She’d woken beneath him
& the dull knife in his fist.
She knocked ash in the tray.
Laying her cigarette to rest,
she said don’t be afraid
to kill pregnant opossums
with your garbage lid.
She’d driven her husband
past the Super Walmart
to nurses who wore shadow.
She opened a fresh pack,
left a pair of broken canes
in a box by the curb.
Henhouse
She has to slide her hands
under the hot bellies of hens,
take their eggs sticky with flitter.
Red as their rose combs,
she remembers nervous fat,
what a friend’s breast felt like
through a linen dress. Brushing
sweat from her widow’s peak,
she latches shut the coop
she slept inside as a girl,
tucked away from Grizzle’s
hollering Rooster after her.
Eggs drop into the basket
she carries out back
where hen-sisters died,
necks pressed to a tree stump
or wrung like dishrags
against barn doors. She washes
the eggs in cold water, arresting
their pink & yellow amnion.
She lays them into cartons
to cool while their sisters
hang from the rafters.
Squint your eyes—tobacco—
juice spilling to the floor.
Holly Mitchell: "I've started reading Night by Etel Adnan, a nice and tattered public library copy. I'm about midway through the audiobook of Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor. In the usual sense, I recently finished Stay Safe by Emma Hine, though I'm still holding onto it to type up some of the poems."
