I heard when you got to New York you went about
picking up every blonde woman in a white dress
and a beret looking for me. I only knew of your dark
leathery hand sliding into the ninth floor of my hotel
window to cradle me like that night we met atop
the world and you permitted me breathe in the palm
of your hand like a goddess as you chewed large shoots
of bamboo. In the heart of the jungle, I somersaulted
to appease you. You could have eaten my skull, a large
juicy olive. But people do not see a man whose love
was more powerful than survival. They called you
the missing link, a beast, and shot you in the back
when you became a fruitless venture. I think everyone
should understand love is not human; it’s animal—
that more often than not it will slip through your hands
like mud. I wish I could put your primordial heart
to the ground, show them you were terrified of losing,
how you went to a place knowing you could not return. 

Hollie Dugas lives in New Mexico. Her work has been included in Barrow Street, Reed Magazine, Qu, Redivider, Salamander, Poet Lore, The Louisville Review, The Penn Review, Breakwater Review, Third Coast, RHINO, Sixth Finch, Phoebe, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. Additionally, “A Woman’s Confession #5,162” won the Western Humanities Review’s Mountain West Writers’ Contest (2017). Hollie has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets. Most recently, she won the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize at CALYX and the 2022 Heartwood Poetry Prize. She was also a finalist in the Atlanta Review’s 2022 International Poetry Contest.