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