Poetry by Holly Hunt

Matthias Ripp CC



​
Beyond Styx I Touched the Nevertheless

Somber as an ancient raisin my cousin
said to me about the swelling in my brain,
Don’t cry don’t cry everybody dies.
And icy town Denver came to me that night
a whole avalanche of mountain standard time
the chipper newsy broadcast midnight team  
invaded my life with live dancers onstage.
It was that so leaning backward rocky mountain 
motion that set up shop on top of my hopeless
ocean where drifted the world damnation news.
The current almost facts lifted feathery above the truer
prehistoric giant eels with million yearlong tentacles
beneath the surface way down there where
all the purest people go to make the purest
evil pretending not to hurt the world.
                              
I stood to the side of the cameraman
holding my very own gun 
I couldn’t remember how to fire.
But I walked around dancers right up to the liar 
up to the producer a fresh hire from Hades.
I just had to touch his far away lofty wow
western long blonde aspen forest know-it-all. 
I told him I knew all about his total lack of pain
all about the such and such
going on beneath us all and all
the what and what he’d never name.
He glanced away oh he brushed me aside
with that blank saintly stare of Pluto’s little moon
another one who wears his always calm
from the cleanest dry cleaner’s chemical fume
the perr-chloro-ethylene delighted eyes
of those guys who just can’t stop killing.
Nevertheless his eminence I just had to touch
his black cashmere shoulder without spot
to brush upon on the still that seals a rush
of a soul that never opens a button of guilt.
As if he cared for one blink or might feign concern,
I said Don’t worry you won’t miss me much.

​


Holly Hunt is from the Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas. She lives with her cat and her husband who was raised by wolves and the Grateful Dead in California. Her poems and essays are in journals all over the US. Her MFA is from the University of Arkansas. For two years she studied with the amazing, shamanistic James Dickey, on a fellowship for women at the University of  South Carolina.



​
Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

Donate