Guilt: the Way


Holly Simonsen

things fall

gull,

wave-tossed

 

sand-blasted

neck into wing

 

( ~

)

the only way

there is only Way

 

The body is marked with an oar

your

throat

oarthroat

offal parts

brim the track

 

This Lake is cut

in two

 

To learn to move deftly across the flat

I rest as downward dog

 

You offer pods for my ears:

 

The Message is the Message is coming still the Message

Ground into Being / Bean Gone

 

Another feminine shape, allowed to swell

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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