Waiting, with One Hand Raised
Is it a greeting, or incomplete
motion? Where does it begin and end?
Mimic: wipe the dust
down from the corners.
I’m not necessarily clean,
but carving out a little space
in what I have, and who’s to say
that’s not enough?
There has to be a limit
to this kind of shifting
of weight, like transferring a basket
from hip to hip to ease the strain, but then
the whole body bends, slowly drying
like long-soaked reeds.
I want to see
how skin browns
under different bulbs—
stick your leg out like
that.
How should I speak,
now that it’s been long enough
to warrant your attention? There is ice accumulating
on the windowsill
between the screen and solid pane.
You can see the snow is thick as fur
on the aching pine branches. Look
how it blows from tree to tree.
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.
