Neon Mariposa Magazine
Cat Gut by Holly Day
across the room from me, my guitar
pulses bright colors, throbs dreams
I can’t ignore. I think about sleep
but the music’s too loud.
my guitar sprouts lilies
not intended to twine, purrs
of birds I’ll never see
but it knows all about them.
even idle, I can feel
the razor-slide of metal strings
cutting grooves into worn calluses
changing my fingerprints just enough that
future scholars will recognize the damage.
my guitar blooms like a lotus
floating on a blue sea I can’t climb out of
pulses waves of songs near-realized even
when silent, invades my dreams to remind me
that I am not in control of this.
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).