One of 108 beads rolls loose
from your mala
the lost bead
— the seed syllable
becomes the Way we learn to break
the glass.
to carry what is already (un)dead
to limn
the cords the body produces and when they must be cut
You follow me into the water
I can’t keep my sentience or yours
Hollow, we will string it then free it from us
I will hurt you but I will not kill you
We learn to wear what we cannot bear — what cannot be borne
Xhe feeds
Holly Simonsen lives and works in her native Utah landscape. For the past five years she has been working in poetic collaboration with the Great Salt Lake. Her poems explore the relationship between language and ecologically disturbed environments. She also works off the page with installation art and visual poetry. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, and NANO-Fiction. Her manuscript, S AL T F LA T, was a finalist for the 2012 Yale Younger Poets Prize, among others. She was a recent fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and the Djerassi Resident Artists’ Program.
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