PROSE POETRY​

MOLLY STURDEVANT

MY HOLOCENE PORTION


An indeterminate percentage of me is the way winter arrived sideways and stayed so long that the sight of green grass was a lusty thrill four months later. Unfortunately, you can jog through the whole season now. You can call snow an event. You can report snow. People will find that interesting. Once, I ate a trout from Groundhog Reservoir which I pulled from the iced water from a hole my brothers augured and by which we sat and drank and watched, not knowing exactly with such acuity as I do now that we should have recorded it, how a fathom of ice looks and smells, sure enough for your weight and your siblings and cold then sweet with a side of lemon, winter had eyes that could pop off and might be pregnant when you cleaned it, roe or guts coiled out onto the kitchen counter. An indeterminate percentage of me is the way spring slept in naked under the duvet then came up legends of buds in the mood of a Saturday without plans. No, that was real; spring wasn’t just tornadoes and the wracked jackets of newscasters mooring their careers against rivers lashing the Burger King, wind beating their microphone, rain choosing a whole car and putting it somewhere else.
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​Molly Sturdevant's writing appears or is forthcoming in Orion, Newfound, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, The Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Montana Prize in Fiction 2019 and a Pushcart nominee in 2020. She lives in the Chicago area. She can be found on Twitter @mksturdevant.