swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

spill
Janis Butler Holm

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spill

“An uncertain music / like a water pipe starting and stopping.”
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Like the corky prancing
of dulcet hurrahs,
this sports a fine forelock.
I’m in for a spill.

It’s all about incidents,
about wiry clueness.

Consider our damage,
our neighborhood catgut,
the stumbling habits
of grassier animals.

Catch the new-gaited
clip of my slip
(used and calendared),
the shifts and the shimmies
of rounded bassoons.

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Janis Butler Holm served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal, and currently works as a writer and editor in sunny Los Angeles. Her prose, poems, art, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines. Her plays have been produced in the U.S., Canada, Russia, and the U.K.