The Next Day

The alarm went off and we found that the world

hadn’t ended, that all the ramblings of the church elders

weren’t true. My husband sighed and rolled out of bed

found there were only dirty clothes left for him to wear

sighed again, dressed, went to work. 

I could hear birds chirping in the yard

a squirrel on the roof, cars

passing on the road out front. 

I held onto my dreams of apocalypse

for a few moments longer, savoring visions

of the angels, the devastation

that could still be waiting just outside the door. 

Butterfly Cage

when I was pregnant, all of my dreams

were about snakes. as much as I tried

to dream only about baby kittens, baby puppies

human babies, my nights would be filled

with twisting pythons gathered in knots

inside me, their slick skin undulating

in the dark, pushing and bumping as if

trying to find a way out.

friends without children would ask me 

what it was like to be pregnant and I’d

have to lie. I was so worried that

imagining the baby inside me was a coiled serpent

in my stomach

meant that I was already a bad mother

meant something was wrong with my baby.

“It’s like being a butterfly house, ” I’d say instead.

“I’m all full of fluttering butterflies.” I’d put his or her hand

on my straining stomach as I spoke, whispering

“Can you feel them move? Can you feel it?

Isn’t it wonderful?”

The Light

We wait for the bombs to feel us out

pass the potatoes, say grace over the odd angels

that have watched over us for years

through the stained-glass windows of old churches

through the eyes of Orthodox iconography. This is a moment of peace

that will never come again.

Through the windows, the strength of distant concussions

fold trees in half, take grain silos and snap power lines. 

We turn up the gas, clear the dinner table

I put a knife in your hand, just in case.

The sky grows as dark as if seen through closed eyes

windows shake and fly apart. Hands

over their eyes, I stretch out next to the children

tell them it’s just the sound of His voice, there’s nothing 

to be afraid of,  it’ll all work out in the end. 

Dirty American Poem #3

the soldiers didn’t seem to care

that the hotel we were staying in

was haunted. they didn’t seem even a little interested

when we told them chairs were moving all by themselves

that we could hear voices whispering in the bathroom pipes

that the clocks had all stopped exactly at midnight.

the people in the streets outside

didn’t seem to care either, seemed more concerned with

pushing back against the soldiers, standing ground

in front of their own crumbling, possibly haunted hovels

seemed more annoyed than anything when we

said we needed to find another place to stay. 

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).