Love
Cages
If you move too fast, your skin will come loose, will twist off in curls
like when you unravel the skin off an apple. So don’t move so fast
because I love you and I don’t want to see you hurt.
If you need validation, ask a tree, because they’re good listeners.
If you press your ear to the trunk of a tree, you can hear the pulse of sap
like the pulse of your heart. A tree is a good confidant.
It can handle all the hard secrets that I can’t.
When it’s time for bed, I will allow you one kiss and one hug
because this is what I’m contracted to do. You tell me there was a time
that I used to read you stories before you fell asleep, but I don’t remember this.
It must have been your other mother.
Somewhere, aliens on another planet are constructing cages for us
based on the televised programs beamed from our satellites
with regularly spaced allotments set aside for television commercials.
When they come to get us, we’ll have to live in these cages, surrounded by melodrama
of noisy housewives and excitable police officers, John Wayne reruns
and product placements for everything from animated toilet cleansers
to cats that ask in English for their dinner.
There are those who will welcome this confinement gladly
because they already live in a world of their own construct,
based on the TV shows they watch.
Others will have to be transferred from one setting to another
from a cop show to a cartoon series to a ‘70s slice-of-life sitcom etc.
before they can finally settle down, accept their cage.
None of the cages will feature science fiction episodes of any sort
in the belief that they might foster feelings of hope,
thoughts of possible relations between interspecies
or lead to a elaborate escape.
Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).
