Holly Day
The Rite of Exploration
You make me want to drill holes in my skull
wrap wires around my brain, sink drill bits and fingertips into
my body, map the lace of fine blood vessels
with radioactive dyes, trace my skeleton through my skin
with melted solder and #2 pencils
dig a place inside me for you to curl up and sleep
never leave. I want you to have it all:
my skin to wrap in a sheet around your shoulders
or around your waist when you step out of the bath
my skull and pelvis to prop open the door
when you need to bring new furniture into the house
fingers and toes to shim under wobbly table legs and chairs
the rest of my blood to stain the floor more evenly
to match the spot on the wood where I fell.
3 Days
I have the sudden desire
To eat paint chips, drink turpentine, root around in the garden
For toadstools and mushrooms
Fight a bear. The phone sits in its cradle, refusing to liberate me
From all of the good choices in life that brought me to this point
The conscious good-food choices and intermittent exercise
The firm shake of my head when offered dangerous substances
To ingest, to smoke, to shove up my ass.
There are things I did that could have led me to this point
But it doesn’t seem like there were enough.
The Spider in the Funeral Parlor
The spider does not recognize the woman as human
as it crawls across her stiff, starched collar
en route to the dark corner of the open coffin. There is nothing here
that would tell it that this is a person, no warmth
emanating from her flesh, no pulse beneath the pale, white skin
no blood. The spider might as well be crawling over
the folded hands of a marble statue, the still chest
of a toppled goliath, a jumble of broken doll parts.
If the spider were to recognize the woman
as such, would it surmise that her blood had been removed
by something like itself, some massive creature that drained blood
from its victims, replacing all bodily fluids with corrosive liquid
leaving the outer shell of the corpse to fade in on itself
slowly, as though collapsed by a slow leak or a steady hand?
And would our little spider fear this creature that could drain
something as large as this dead woman, would it
look elsewhere than the coffin for a safe place for its web
perhaps continue on to the far corner of the chapel instead?
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 The Richard Hugo Center in Seattle and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.