WHO ARE YOU?
by JOAN HOULIHAN
A corsage face-out in cellophane.
My ankle socks cuffed and white.
Thin for the shoe’s tight fit.
Crinoline—because a girl.
Gloves—because impure.
I lie down in dirt and animals,
once pets, soft-pad
their worth, come halting,
put their heads down first
then lie with me. I’m
leafy, in pieces.
Pink at the bud, stunted.
My skin is an organ of memory.
Home is a rustle of sleeves,
flooded eyes. A building
where strangers sort my clothes.
HIM
by JOAN HOULIHAN
Foraged pillow, musty sheet,
a drop of him in the seam—
I cover the body
and turn the lamp away.
A sky beneath the skin
comes apart, a water mass where he lay.
Sunken, embedded bog of a bog.
He’s a bog two stories down.
I need to haul up the last bottom.
Rotten bottom. He’s rotted out!
Blue skin, dark-nailed, as out of a brew,
past he went, and with him, the sun.
Now that he’s gone, I will lie down
and pretend I am little again.
When there is no more mention of him.
THEY PUT HER IN A BED
by JOAN HOULIHAN
Fusebox, brainbox, busted.
Her look is murder.
A ghost-horde talks out of her head:
‘It’s alright. I’m alright.’
They stanch the hole with a little red hanky.
‘This is my newspaper,’ she says,
fingering the bedsheet.
She liked to keep up with the news.
Her hands stick out.
Her head is small.
Once I had a shrunken head
made of rubber from Jack’s Joke Shop.
I stole it from my brother’s room
when he swallowed a lot of alcohol
and had a fall down the steep upstairs.
They took him out on a stretcher.
‘It’s about time,’ he said with a gleam in his eye
and a bleed inside his head.
‘You end up in here with no pants.’ She says.
‘I like your little bracelet,’ I say.
‘You mean this?’ She holds up her wristband.
‘Yes. But I can’t read your name.’
‘My name is hold still.’
A hold in the body is like a hold in a ship.
Stored over time, what’s held there will rot.
It’s not complicated. You rot.
Ready or not
you enter the place to be held.
I try to hold her. She balks.
I finally see her right—
sewed up, aged, not a shred of regret.
She’s somewhere inside her body.
I never told her how I felt.
I didn’t know how and I don’t know now
and I’ll never get rid of her cozy-me-ups,
the bang of her feet when she walked,
the sidelong eye filling me in, the voice
from inside her face—
‘My name is hold still or I’ll hold you down.’
‘My name is this won’t hurt you.’
‘My name is swallow it all.’
author pic here
Joan Houlihan is the author of six poetry collections and essays, most recently It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest from Four Way Books, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award in Poetry and a Notable Indie Award. She is founder and director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference and a longtime teacher of writing, previously at Columbia, Emerson, Smith and Lesley’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She currently teaches private workshops online. Her work has appeared widely in national journals, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Harvard Review, Poetry International, Plume and others, as well as in several anthologies.
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