Let Her Go
Amy Holman

        Fields open, bicycles lock. Every girl sees
                 through the leaves, lured to the edge: mind open, body locked.
                            Running feet, beating heart, blue yonder.
                 Can't every girl escape
                            childhood, in charge of herself—flora
to be fawned over, a body she unlocks?

        If she missed being the field swayed by one small shoe,
                 lock of hair in the backseat, body
hidden under pines—at least not wholly a disruption of clues—
                                                   how does she endure her hidden body
                 ruptured?

                 Every girl is bored looking for summer
when it's disappearing and every girl disappearing whispers in our ears
                                      I do not beguile.

© Amy Holman

© Dream Horse

Amy Holman is the author of Wait For Me, I'm Gone, which won the 2004 Annual Dream Horse Press National Chapbook Competition, and A Writer's Guide to MFA Programs, Artist Colonies and Grants, forthcoming from Perigee in 2006. Her poetry and prose have been in Verse Daily, The Cortland Review, Xconnect, Night Train, Shade, AWP JOBLetter, Poets & Writers Magazine, Archaeology Magazine Online, and the anthologies, Making the Perfect Pitch, The Practical Writer, and The Best American Poetry 1999. She guest teaches at The New School, Hudson Valley Writers Center and Bread Loaf Writers Conference.