Holli Carrell
Origin Story
Down that deep
my root-spine grew
in rough mineral,
a hollow knot
of bone,
thumbed in like a seed.
I swallowed
old bones and future bones,
sand, silt, and clay,
so I might open
vein-laced
above the dirt.
I flexed
like a maggot
flexes
through the dark
earth,
swelled and heard
life strike above me.
I wasn’t ready
when I felt the frozen soils
shift from winter
to spring,
and the dream
I dreamed
of the body I wasn’t yet
I became.
Holli Carrell reads “Origin Story”
Holli Carrell is a Pushcart-nominated poet who lives, writes, and teaches in Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. Her writing has appeared in Salt Hill, Bennington Review, Quarterly West, Blackbird, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, The Florida Review, and other places. She has received support from the NY State Summer Writers Institute and is a graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Hunter College, where she was a recipient of the Colie Hoffman Poetry Prize and a Norma Lubetsky Friedman Scholarship.