by Tom Holmes
Paleolithic Hallucinations
Herd of bison on the land
see everything to the horizon.
Mountains rise on the horizon
like a bison’s hump.
Weightless bison underground
see us stare through them.
Tomorrow we will follow them –
they will run like a wandering eye.
My body is not here –
it’s lost in the bison.
The mane of a bison
is the breast of every woman.
I close my eyes –
they’re filled with floating horns.
Where there are horns,
brushes and hooves follow.
The bison are thirsty today –
we will paint and draw.
Slowly we draw
our feminine sides.
The First Vulva
Before there was death
there was sleep
and two men
who did not sleep
or know how.
A woman arrived
with her red vulva.
Her vulva glowed
in the cave’s corridors
she led them through
until there were no corridors
and no light
but her glowing red vulva.
She closed her legs.
The men witnessed afterglow
floating in their eyes
as tiny worms,
vortexes, and lightening.
She sang songs
like dry leaves and cicadas
for six days
until they snored.
On the seventh day
she plugged one man’s nose
and let the other breathe.
She never returned.
And the one man learned to die.
And the other learned to draw
vulvas and the fear of dying.
Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry, Poetics, & Prose and the author of six collections of poetry. His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/
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