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.