shoes/eric/vitae/unencumbered - holly day

Shoes

if it hadn’t been for the new shopping mall

they never would have found the bodies.

six skeletons, strung with dried skin

tied to trees in the heart of the forest.

after the bodies were identified

as coming from good, upscale families

that still lived in town, naming

some of the new roads leading to the shopping mall

after the dead girls

seemed like a good idea.

after further consideration, though

they decided to just give the girls

a really nice funeral.

Eric

my nephew comes home

from the war

cocky, proud, boasting

of how stupid the people “over there” are

how backward their way of life is

it breaks my heart remembering

the baby in my arms

the little boy with the wide brown eyes

who dreamed of driving his own tractor

someday

who is this man

telling stories of military exercises

of kicking down doors to rescue children

from their “ignorant” mothers

drinking beer and showing off his scars

what have they done to

my sweet little friend

Vitae

he was already dead as a doorknob when they found him

his head cradled in his arms, phone cradled in his hand

he could have been sleeping, dreaming of Saturday

except for all the blood.

it must have taken unflinching persistence, patience, fear

of the timeclock tick-ticking in the corridor

to complete crunching the day’s sales receipts

with a hole as big as a ledger in his chest. 

Unencumbered

oh, the whirr of wheels and wire and endless

scraping of skin on silvery track, my sleep, the scrape of skin on

splintered wood and wondering what they’ll say when they find me,

the rush, the roar, racing toward the light

the fading, floating echo of speed

oh, the imagined eyes of an imaginary crowd as the train

pull into the station, the concrete landing,

the eyes of the crowd opening wide

as the train pulls in and the hands reach out

trying to catch me, stop me,

much, much too late

oh, I love a train

Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes in the Minneapolis school district. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Worcester Review, Broken Pencil, and Slipstream, and she is the recipient of the 2011 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published book is “Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch,” while her novel, “The Trouble With Clare,” is due out from Hydra Publications in 2013.