ALCHEMY’S DARLING

By Hollie Dugas

A heart is a slippery thing
that hangs down from my throat.
Sometimes, I feel it pulsing
its red juice
sour as a thimbleberry
into the dark pods of my ribs
while my body lives on,
shuffling toward god’s drum
like a wind-up figurine.
I am what alchemy refers to
as darling, an improbable thing.
And I live with myself,
as my heart lives with itself, creature
in a cage, chewing on an old clock,
keeping the memories in my blood.
If you want to know me,
peel back my skin,
place your fingers
in the murmuring wound.

Hollie Dugas lives in New Mexico. Her work has been selected to be included in Barrow Street, Reed Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Redivider, Porter House Review, Pembroke, Salamander, Poet Lore, Watershed Review, Mud Season Review, Little Patuxent Review, The Louisville Review, The Penn Review, Chiron Review, Louisiana Literature, and CALYX. Hollie has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets 2021. She has also been a finalist twice for the Peseroff Prize at Breakwater Review, Greg Grummer Poetry Prize at Phoebe, Fugue’s Annual Contest, and has received Honorable Mention in Broad River Review. Additionally, “A Woman’s Confession #5,162” was selected as the winner of Western Humanities Review Mountain West Writers’ Contest (2017). Most recently, her poem was selected as winner of the 22nd Annual Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize at CALYX, in addition to, the 2022 Heartwood Poetry Prize. She was also a finalist in the Atlanta Review’s 2022 International Poetry Contest. Currently, she is on the editorial board for Off the Coast.