On the Steps of Cocke Hall
“Classes, for the most part, went on in spite of the revolution.” —from The Roanoke Times, May 2, 2001
When I think of spring, I remember
three naked girls painted
red for May Day—
protest time in Virginia.
It doesn’t matter what they stood for
(red bodies, naked) standing
under the oaks, in the grass
(naked, bodies, shifting arms)
behind the private college walls,
and don’t get me wrong,
I’m all for nudity, public,
private, (red bodies, glimpses
of white walking up stairs)
still, I can’t help but wonder: after washing
that night, and waking the next day
with red crescents still under
their nails, tangled in their hairlines—
had the paint, once filling nearly every pore,
absorbed all that had spilled
from our mouths,
four local news affiliates,
radio deejays—
could they just wash it away,
pull up the covers, and sleep?
Or was it wetting old blood from a wound,
something you press against
every day to watch the red
flow, to remind yourself?
Anne Holub received a creative writing MA from Hollins University in Virginia and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Montana. Her poetry has been featured on Chicago Public Radio and in The Mississippi Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, Phoebe: A Journal of Literary Arts and The Beacon Street Review, among other publications. She has two poems published in the anthology Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing (Open Country Press 2018), and recently completed an artist residency at the Flathead Lake Bio Station in Montana through the arts organization Open AIR Montana. Originally from Virginia, and after more than a decade in Chicago, she now lives and writes in Billings, Montana with her husband Dan and their two dogs Merle and Rosie.
