I.
“Koi,” in Japanese,
is homophonic for the word “love.”
Koi fish can recognize
the person that feeds them.
Circling your mother’s pond,
they open their wide mouths
to vanish the pellets.
II.
Klimt’s ladies in gold
Flowers in their heavy amber hair
Subject of the female body
A hunger
III.
“Don’t look directly at it,”
you say, “I know it’s hard not to
because I was doing it, too.”
“I’ve never seen it so close,”
I say, “and so bright orange.”
“It’s pink,” you say,
“I think we see colors differently.”
Holly Mason received her MFA in Poetry from George Mason University, where she taught and served as the blog editor for So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art. Her poems have appeared in Outlook Springs, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, The Northern Virginia Review, and forthcoming in Foothill Poetry Journal.
Image by Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63604
