Poems by Holaday Mason ​

Balsamic Phase


I smell heat. A creak of floorboard. A loose nail. No, the dog’s too long nails. 
The minute hand clicks.  I’ve a preference for clocks run by batteries & circles. 
I chose not to have children. Lie alone, breathing. Thought I would not do
so well. Was likely right.  Yes.  There now, there’s that screaming owl. What
was that lost word? No need to have children, there are so many of us.  And
so many lost words. But I never forgot the metallic scent of water gushed
from a hot summer hose—the pools of water on the grass—how we would
run & slide. I only saw fireflies once as a small child in the Midwest, when
there were no fences between lawns. No one had one.  Perhaps that sound
is a racoon or two come inside through the open back door.  Let them come in.
                                                                                                 Let them eat.



Milagro
 
I am wing, clavicle, harpsichord, fling of jasmine, I am a leg
crooked at an impossible angle--I am pounded & lost but
familiar with angels—I’m a cherry of blood—a flicker in the
corner of your eye—I am the friend who was told by a friend
not to drink, I’m the pair of small scissors that cuts my own hair— 
the burning wick the scissors snip low, I’m the coins I stole from
my mother’s purse, I am my mother’s lips & the only words she
has left, I am the outline of her wrinkled left hand drawn with
a number two pencil around the shape of my right hand—I am
a ring of emerald chips signifying independence then buried in mud,
I’m the rider of the horse & the horse that’s wandered too far north
to turn back—I am clean sheets flying off a line in the updraft of a
brief lightning storm – the bird calls in the original forest—akin
to a rhyme, fervently shrill, sometimes a lullaby—I am a daughter
who lay with a mother in her final bed, watching a cartoon film
of the Buddha’s life—I am all four Maras (greed, sloth, envy, lust)— 
I am night dressed up in night & I like this—I’m the expert in the
story of lost keys—I am a single object pounded into inexpensive
metal— I am not fond of the full moon,  its many knives--I am
ready to be left in a chapel of sand, prayer, rusty crutches--I will
always be wild, a garden of thorns, roots, untidy blades of grass.
I am every uncertain bloom of summer—I am the petals as they fall.
 
 

Holaday Mason’s sixth collection “As if Scattered” was published Oct. 2024. Multiple Pushcart nominee, widely published, she served as co-editor for Beyond Baroque’s anthology Echo 681 where nowadays she sometimes leads writing workshops. Currently, poetry editor for online art & poetry magazine, Furious Pure, she lives in Venice Ca. with one composer & educator husband, a big old hound & the queen of everything—Ms. Twirly Tail the tortoise shell cat. http://www.holadaymason.com

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