{"id":8414,"date":"2023-10-31T20:54:07","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T20:54:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/?p=8414"},"modified":"2023-10-31T20:54:07","modified_gmt":"2023-10-31T20:54:07","slug":"in-lieu-of-a-red-pencil-5-poems-by-holly-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/in-lieu-of-a-red-pencil-5-poems-by-holly-day\/","title":{"rendered":"In Lieu of a Red Pencil. 5 Poems by Holly Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
\r\n Closer<\/strong>\r\n\r\nSometimes you have to get super close to see what the problem is.\r\nYou\u2019ve got to take a thing apart and study it under a magnifying glass, a  microscope,\r\nan electron microscope, a nanoscope. Only then can you see how truly fucked up\r\nsomething is. I tell you this, I wave the photographs under your nose\r\ntell you all the things bubbling under family picnics and Christmas sweaters\r\nbut you have subsided beneath concrete and denial. I  could set a barbecue\r\non top of your hiding place, have all the neighbors over\r\nand no one would ever know\r\nThe police could come with their dogs and even they would not know.\r\n\r\nSometimes you have to rip a wedding dress into shreds and make a ladder out of it\r\nsometimes you have to stuff bits of the wedding dress\r\ninto the necks of bottles filled with gasoline\r\nbefore anyone listens.\r\nSometimes yelling isn\u2019t enough because people develop selective hearing over time.\r\nSometimes you have to get super close to see what the problem is.\r\n\r\n\r\nand Run<\/strong>\r\n\r\nYou can wake up before the sun rises, pull the suitcase out\r\nfrom under the bed, slip into your shoes\r\nstep quietly out the door\r\nbut you will never leave them. You can dress up in any\r\ntraveling costume you want, apply for a passport\r\ntell the dog you\u2019re sorry it has to be this way\r\nslip into your children\u2019s bedrooms and kiss them\r\nin the dark\r\n\r\nbut you will never actually step out that door, no matter how much\r\nyou\u2019ve spent on that plane ticket, that overnight bag\r\nthose high heels that seem silly on a mother, a wife.\r\nIt\u2019s all pretend, which is why\r\nYou always keep receipts for anything other than groceries\r\nyou always cancel your flights, your cruises, you rental cars\r\nwithin the 24 hour return window\r\n\r\nbecause there is nothing that can tear you away from this reality you\u2019ve built\r\nthere is no fantasy strong enough to pull you all the way out the door.\r\n\r\n \r\nWhen It Happens<\/strong>\r\n\r\nWhen I kill you, it will be as a bird, a crane with a long, sharp beak\r\ngreat wings stretched out like an angry cape, there will be no misunderstanding\r\nno talking me down, as a bird I cannot help but be very single-minded\r\nwith eyes as black and sharp as my intentions. You\u2019ll see.\r\n\r\nWhen you hear me singing outside your window, perhaps tapping on the glass\r\nin the middle of the night, when a bird should be asleep, head tucked under a wing\r\nyou\u2019ll know why I\u2019m there and how I\u2019ve come and what I\u2019ll do\r\nbecause you\u2019ve read it all in the chicken scratch of diary pages\r\nin the letters I\u2019ve folded into the thatch of our nest.\r\n\r\n\r\nCarrier<\/strong>\r\n\r\nI slip a piece of paper beneath the perch and ask the bird to take a letter\r\npaint ink on its little toes and dictate in German. In between my bad diction\r\nand the canary\u2019s inability to properly shape words, I imagine\r\nthat someone might think we had composed a poem together,\r\nwritten in some archaic language from an extinct desert people\r\nwho carved words in the mud with the ends of pointed sticks.\r\n\r\nThis is how hard it is for me to talk to you, it\u2019s as agonizing\r\nas corresponding via avian persuasion. In the end\r\nthe letter I pull out of the bird cage will need heavy editing\r\nbefore I fold it into a paper crane, puff air into its chest to fill it out\r\ntoss it out the window and pretend it\u2019s fluttered away.\r\n\r\n\r\n In Lieu of a Red Pencil<\/strong>\r\n\r\nThe longer a book sits on a shelf in the basement\r\nthe more editorializing book mites and silverfish makes to the passages\r\nthe more likely entire passages will be excised from chapters\r\nby brachiating arms of lichen and blossoming paper molds.\r\n\r\nEventually, the book will become more the property of the tiny editors\r\nthat swallow words whole and allow pages to disintegrate\r\nuntil it becomes so unrecognizable  from the original text\r\nthat even the author will have a hard time explaining the inspiration\r\nbehind phrases reduced to nonsense, illustrations encrusted beyond repair.<\/pre>\n
\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n
Holly Day<\/strong> <\/p>\n
Short bio: Holly the books, and Day\u2019s poetry has appeared in over 4,000 publications internationally and she is the co-author of Music Theory for Dummies Music Composition for Dummies<\/em>.She currently works as an instructor at The Richard Hugo Center in Seattle and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. <\/p>\n
Holly’s cover note to the Editor:<\/strong><\/p>\n
Dear Robin Ouzman Hislop, Poetry Editor, Artvilla:<\/p>\n
Just outside my window, hundreds of brown and white sparrows are covering my back yard. They blend in so well with the curled brown leaves and dried-out plants that the only way I can tell they\u2019re there is when one of them encroaches on the other\u2019s foraging space, resulting in an explosion of tiny wings and the occasional puff of loose feathers. Every fall, this congregation of birds both excites and depresses me\u2014excites me because it\u2019s simply glorious to see so much wildlife, even if it is just sparrows, right outside my window, yet depressing because they only gather like this at the end of summer. <\/p>\n
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<\/i><\/a><\/span>\n<\/i><\/a><\/span><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Closer Sometimes you have to get super close to see what the problem is. You\u2019ve got to take a thing apart and study it under a magnifying glass, a microscope, an electron microscope, a nanoscope. Only then can you see how truly fucked up something is. I tell you this, I wave the photographs under … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[627,808,796,366,401,43],"tags":[18,136,3],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8414"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8414"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8416,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8414\/revisions\/8416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artvilla.com\/plt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}