Your tooth against the grained earth
cut and you smell
prong(ed)(ness) lassitude
No stranger than giving birth
Fire
flattened
the splinter
reeds
into paper
burned a five-toed creature
Pause,
Check in with your Mother
You’ve made it all up
Otherwise, there is a graveyard of glass
You look for the blown pieces
that might reform
the violent hiss of the initial
shatter
Even months later, you can see you’ve been here
parenthetical instep
purple shards arranged,
biting down
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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