Issue Thirty-Five - Winter 2020

Subsidence

By Kathleen Holliday

Like a thatched cottage
on a windswept isle
abandoned,
this edifice too, will settle,
sink slowly, thistle-deep
into loam.

Someday an archaeological intern
may smooth away the mossy earth
with soft brushes,
unearth the implements of this life:
empty Uniball pen barrels,
a shard of Blue Willow bowl,
spines of books articulating what was read,
soles of shoes stopped in their striding.

All of which may sprout academic theories
as to the circumstances of this
emigrant’s last look of home—

turfed out abruptly
by an implacable landlord?

a sudden withering blight?

or after a long, tumultuous voyage,
with sails luffing, going hull down
over the horizon, to find safe harbor
at last in the New World?

The stratum, if left alone long enough,
might be harvested in oblongs,
rolled and stacked against another house,
ready for laying down in a grate
in a room where voices sing,
fiddles and drums play,

to warm a cold night.

Copyright 2020 Holliday

Kathleen Holliday lives on an island in the Salish Sea. Her poems have appeared in The Bellingham Review, The Blue Nib Literary Magazine, Cathexis Northwest Press, New Ohio Review, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry Super Highway, SHARK REEF, The Write Launch and other journals. She is a graduate of Augsburg University, Minneapolis, MN. Her first chapbook, Putting My Ash on the Line, was published by Finishing Line Press, 2020; her second, Boatman, Pass By, by Finishing Line Press, 2023.

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