You can only be taken naked

on this lightning road

that is sudden with wonder.

Take off everything

and throw the switch:

you only live in one body.

Walk to where the air sizzles

at the unguarded edge

of things--

the broomstick haunt

of frogs sucking moon sauce

and bragging about it.

Steal back the language

that runs between worlds—

chanting the vespers

of enchantment.

Make a halo of the tide,

following seals sliding on the

belly-memory of mud.

When the dew

is an organ pipe of color,

keep remembering

music.

Don't ask too many questions.

Just keep keeping time

to the song of the sun

as you paint enough doors

to walk through walls.

Madronna Holden’s poetry took first place in the 2022 Kay Snow Poetry Contest.  In the last three years, her poetry has appeared in over two dozen literary journals, including Cold Mountain Review, the Bitter Oleander and Equinox Poetry and Prose—and has been featured in Verse Daily.  She is the author of the chapbook, Goddess of Glass Mountains (Finishing Line Press: 2021).