Lucy: a story about color


Holly Simonsen

Teal and its complement,

blood on snow

Neither is believable

 

But the hen!

 

Lucy is naked

Her plaid skirt

 

speculum plumage,

eclipsed,

 

for the drake rapes

 

After release

the lost feather

is not held aloft

and offered to the wind

 

Vagina dentata Vacuous smile

The first woman is every woman

We re/covered her mandible

 

Lucy comes to the door and we do not see her

She lives behind glass and we do not see her

 

We break into a peal

We cover our mouths

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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