Lithogenous
He screams at the car again and I feel my skin growing hard, cold
my face doesn’t move as I fish another beer out of the refrigerator and
bring it out to him in the yard. He takes the beer from me with a grease-
covered hand
says something about how this car could last forever so long as some stupid
broad
wasn’t allowed to drive it. I feel my skin turning to stone
beneath my sweater, growing cold even in the hot summer sun
I tell him I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened, I’m sorry.
the sun starts to set and the car still won’t move, he
says he’s going out, not to wait up for him, not to let anyone else
touch the fucking car. He gets in his own car and I go back
inside the house, make myself a sandwich, turn on the TV.
Later, I’ll call up the bus company, ask the operator how to get to work
from where I am, maybe look up a couple of local mechanics in the phone book
I’ll think about calling them, but I won’t.
Cyhyraeth
The next time I see my mother, it will be because I’m dying
close to death, she will stand at the side of my bed
put her cool hands on my burning forehead
bring me soup.
She will look just like she did
when I drew that last picture of her when I was a child
how I tried to draw her with my imperfect hands:
too beautiful and too young to be so sick.
Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review. Her newest poetry collections are Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), and The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press).
