Holly Day- A Poem

The Burning Sun

There is nowhere left to run. Behind you, smoke billows black and foul
Hot enough to melt lead, turn flesh to liquid, more smoke. The air itself glows red
Burns like the red eyes of a Hollywood-set tiki statute, moves in visible
Currents against the gray starless night, thin wisps of fire in the dark.
This is where even vampires come to die, to burn in agonizing freedom
The confines of flesh shaken, immortality sloughed, denied

In a single sunburst of pure nuclear flame, hot as the heart of a star
Burn shadows of Nosferatu silhouettes into concrete bunker walls
Claws curled and extended in frightening final black-caped profiles, specters
In a cemetery, never to be visited. Buildings loom, dark, glassless, baked
To diamond-hard perfection by the billowing clouds of fire, stand
In empty memoriam to
The final infantile thrashings, the last shadow dance
Of a doomed precocious race.




Short bio: Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis,
Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes in the Minneapolis school
district. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Worcester Review, Broken
Pencil, and Slipstream, and she is a recent recipient of the Sam Ragan
Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her book publications include Music
Composition for Dummies, Guitar-All-in-One for Dummies, Notenlesen für
Dummies Das Pocketbuch, and Music Theory for Dummies, which has recently
been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, and
German. Her novel, "The Trouble With Clare," is due out from Hydra
Publications in 2013.