Holly Day

Tipton Poetry Journal – Fall 2020

The Last Days of the Flu

Holly Day

We move like dying butterflies against each other chitinous wings rasping dry in final death throes like dead leaves pushed along the sidewalk by the wind like dead scales sloughed off against a rock.

I hear my jagged breath echoing your own feeble one lungs rattling like an engine running dry but refusing to die gears almost catching but slipping again and again if I stay here too long, here, next to you I might catch it, too.

The Day the Leaves Started to Change

Holly Day

The bird flutters into the church like some sort of portent disturbs the service with a flurry of feathers. It would be nice if it was a dove, or some brilliant, golden, phoenix-type of bird but it’s just a sparrow come in from the cold.

The preacher waits until the bird has settled before continuing on with his speech, but he is distracted. Every time the bird moves to another corner of the church, he instinctively covers the top of his bald head with one robed arm as if too used to having birds shit on him

while flying overhead.

Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).