HOLLY DAY has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Big Muddy, The Cape Rock, New Ohio Review, and Gargoyle, and her published books include Walking Twin Cities, Music Theory for Dummies, and Ugly Girl. She has been a featured presenter at Write On, Door County (WI), Northwoods Writer's Festival (CA), and the Spirit Lake Poetry Series (MN). Her newest poetry collections, A Perfect Day for Semaphore (Finishing Line Press) and The Yellow Dot of a Daisy (Alien Buddha Press) will be out late 2018.

        Friday

The flies settle around me as if preparing for congress 
and I, I pretend I am one of them, I am also a fly. 
We converse about the habits of frogs and the placement of eggs 
and what it would be like to be a cat or a dog.

We talk until sundown, until they fly off 
to sleep in those secret places only real flies know about 
and I go back in to pretend at humanity 
listen to my mom as she talks about my dad.

        Motes of Sparkling Glass

You can teach brine shrimp to dance 
by shining a flashlight into their tank 
and moving it back and forth. They will follow the light 
like a scarf of sparkling dust mites 
like a swarm of swallows alighting for the night 
like a cloud of gnats discovering a piece of rotted fruit 
like a pulse of transparent blood vessels traveling along a vein.

What they don’t tell you 
in the manual that comes with the tank 
that says shining a light into the tank will teach them to dance 
is that you’re really just tricking the tiny shrimp into thinking 
that their hiding place been suddenly exposed to sunlight 
and sometimes it kills them 
and sometimes it forces them to change gender 
and sometimes it makes them spontaneously reproduce 
and sometimes it does nothing at all, because this whole time 
the tiny specks of dust you shook into the water of your sea monkey tank

weren’t actually brine shrimp eggs at all 
but just bits of sand gathered from the shore of some faraway beach, 
some beautiful, warm, tropical place 
that you will never get to see for yourself.

        Aesthetes

What is it that makes someone 
want to destroy the gigantic white umbrellas of mushrooms spreading 
out over the lawn from one day to the next, growing ever larger 
impossibly fantastic, until that one day when you walk by 
to find the giant white cap split in two, surrounded by dirt clods, uprooted grass 
a single footprint in the mud next to the destruction?

And what makes someone think that no one else would appreciate seeing 
how big and wonderful this mushroom could get, how, 
if just left alone for the rest of the season, it could get big enough 
for a rabbit to hide beneath it during a thunderstorm 
for a frog to huddle beneath its spreading shade 
for a toddler to squat in wonder beside it, face dwarfed 
by the mushroom’s impossible size—

why would I think anyone else wanted to see this?

        The Dog

My mother-in-law brought the dog home the day after I brought my baby home. 
The thing was huge, a great big standard poodle, fully grown with black eyes 
nearly covered in thick curly brown fur. It never made a sound, just watched everyone 
moving around the house, every once in a while asking to be let out the back door.

The dog didn’t react at all to me or my son, didn’t 
come over to smell the baby, or greet me, or do anything different at all. 
It just watched us moving around the house, so quiet 
eventually running upstairs to hide in its crate 
when the baby’s cries were too loud. 
I never even thought of petting the dog 
never saw anyone else touch it, either, never could figure out

why my mother-in-law had brought it home. 
I don’t even remember it having a name. 
A few months later, the dog was gone, and no one ever mentioned 
what had happened to it, why it wasn’t there any more 
why it had even been there in the first place. 
I remember walking around my mother-in-law’s house 
peering into side rooms, looking for the dog, the dog crate 
some random squeaky toy, a gnawed-on rawhide bone, 
anything belonging to a dog

but it was like there had never been a dog in the house at all.

        The Survivors

The survivors will fill the mountain’s cavity, huddled against 
the blast of cataclysmic fire, they will live there in the dark 
in the soft confines of earth as if they 
were already dead and buried.

When the moment comes and passes and they still 
can’t emerge up into the damaged earth, perhaps 
they’ll move further underground 
like ants digging passages 
radiating sideways from the nest. Our future textbooks 
will only speak of these excavations

of the different types of dirt encountered 
of the bones of our ancestors uncovered 
of the thick foundations and metal pinions of buildings 
that must never by followed upward 
one must always dig beneath them in order to pass.