Keep One Eye on the Weather

Winter in Florida is a beast, napping, balmy and soft, muscles

recovering from the ravages of summer and biding its time. Up

north near the Georgia line, my friend says spring is just around

the corner but that she is suspicious, and rightly so. Valentine’s

Day came too early, her hunger for azaleas will have to wait, like

the saint had to wait after he laid his hands on the eyes of the

judge’s blind daughter.

My dream wore me out. It took each element of the day and made

a poison stew I ate in my sleep. Women, all of us, like sad clowns

loosed from a tiny car at the circus. One with a blouse buttoned off

by one button, another drunk on grocery samples lurching through

the aisles with an empty cart, the dying one balancing all of her

books on her head, and me taking the wrong pill at the wrong time,

my hand in my throat trying to grab it back.

 

An agent says I have a memoir in me if I can just keep the dark

stuff in poems, but inside my veins it’s all the same blood.

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Holly Iglesias’ work includes three collections of poetry— Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (Quale Press, 2004). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches in the Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Miami, with a focus on documentary poetry.