Tract (The Soul)

Holly Simonsen
· in

The first slumber party in Angie Bushnell’s unfinished basement I’m light as a feather, afraid I am too fat but stiff as a board, light as all their fingers are just beneath my skin a feather, stiff I inhale and hold as a board until I rise, I believe.

*

If only one toe sticks out, I will have to do it over again…one strand of hair. And so we practice the choreography of baptism in the municipal pool. My cousin Trevor, only a few months older than me, and already taking his sacred rite. We switch and he bends me into full immersion, his hands locked around mine in case I need help plugging my nose. But I don’t; I know how to stop the water from coming in. I know how to keep my air.

*

It would be years before my first exhale. An expectorant that left my lips open in an equilateral triangle, like an infant’s.

Holly Simonsen works in poetic collaboration with the Great Salt Lake. Her poems explore the relationship between language and ecologically disrupted environments. She also works off the page with installation art and visual poetry. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts (2010). Her recent work can be found in Hayden's Ferry Review, Cutbank, Ecotone, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, S AL T F LA T, was a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize (2012), among others. She was a recent fellow at the Vermont Studio Center (2012) and the Djerassi Resident Artists’ Program (2013).