Holli Carrell
All my life, I’ve hungered
for a quiet privacy.
I must explain this to you.
As a girl, I wanted
a door, deep in the vault
of my closet,
a child-sized hole
only I could crawl through.
I tried to hide,
but I could not hide
because God
was always in my mind, listening.
Spirited, premortal,
in the beforelife, He spoke to
me, they said, and I agreed
to His Plan, they said, or else
I wouldn’t be here
in this body. They said
the babies, my babies,
were waiting their turn.
I watched my brothers,
pondered if
I wanted what they had.
I was tired of being
a girl,
but I didn’t want to be a boy, either.
Did I want
nothing?
I wanted nothingness!
To have a body like river silt,
foxglove, smoke.
Yes, to be
river silt, foxglove,
smoke.
Holli Carrell
is a Pushcart-nominated poet originally from Utah, now living in Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati with a certificate in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, The Journal, Salt Hill, Bennington Review, Quarterly West, Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, The Florida Review, and other places. She has received support and honors from the Unterberg Poetry Center, NY State Summer Writers Institute, and Hunter College, where she was a recipient of the Colie Hoffman Poetry Award and a Norma Lubetsky Friedman Scholarship.