Holly Day

The Last Time

Inside a nightmare of cold sweats and invisible centipedes

just like the first time we kicked together, watched Pat Buchanan on TV, mumbled 

about how we were going to change the world as soon as we could

get up.

On another channel, we watched her body bent over, cruciform

I thought I remembered the girl from high school, I think I

sat behind her in some class or another. I think she was the one who first 

introduced me to heroin, I say, wanting to impress you 

with my elbow-rubbing, my important connections.

She took the cock in her mouth through the fuzzy waves of cable TV interference

and I could swear it was Pat Buchanan on the receiving end of that blowjob.

Heroin me, protection against the onslaught of millipedes, the sound bites 

blasting eternal, shopping carts of ant and roach killer 

I opened my heart to you. Woke to find this place empty of everything 

and nothing, the words “junkie” and “nigger” scrawled across one wall. Small wounds

already closed cruciform on my arm, I thought I told you I didn’t like

to watch the news when I was high. 

Drain Fly   

In my own way, I calm my personal desires in an ever-so-familiar pattern

minus intelligible thought, I am just another hole in the wall 

with dirty fingernails.  If I knew sign language, we carry on 

a surgeon-precise conversation.

Hypnotic stupor reflecting on my embarrassment you 

were just being friendly and I am always curious and lonely. I climax

too quickly for most people, I explain, it’s tied to my insecurity, imagined 

recriminations, the constant drip of the bathroom tap. 

There is a hand between my legs, and self-doubt thick in the air

swollen to gargantuan proportions like a tampon ripe with gangrene

I don’t understand our relationship at all and I 

can’t stand the way you look at me these days. 

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Big Muddy, The Cape Rock, New Ohio Review, and Gargoyle. Her newest poetry collections, A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press), I'm in a Place Where Reason Went Missing (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.), and Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing) will be out mid-2018, with The Yellow Dot of a Daisy already out on Alien Buddha Press.