Michelle Holmes

PEASE PORRIDGE COLD

In my bed you whispered
ugly vicious rhymes
made up to make me cry;
I called you best friend
but I meant only.

So I said the Lord’s Prayer
while Mary’s lamb
turned ram and raped her
and the giant got Jacked off
hard you pinched for every tear
and there were drowning
bedsoak streams of them.

Sometimes in the morning
you liked to lift my shirt to see
how bruised nipples swell;
I didn’t know what trespass meant
So I prayed for daily bread.


Michelle reads "Pease Porridge Cold":



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Holmes confesses: "Childhood looks so friendly from the grown-up side. When you are eye-to-eye with it, you know its small brutalities. Most days now, the edges blur, and from this distance, I forget the black and blue and see just jelly sandwich Shangri-La. This poem came from the other kind of day."

MICHELLE HOLMES spent years digging up the depravity of daily life as a newspaper editor in the shadows of Chicago. A yearlong fellowship at Stanford University offered clear air and some perspective, and gave rise to several poems including those published by Barnwood Press, Short, Fast and Deadly and Word Riot.