This selection, chosen by Guest Editor t.r. san, is an excerpt from Apostasies by Holli Carrell (Perugia Press 2025).
I WATCHED BOYS
I knew the lightless spot
was not a place to play—
where the starved cottonwood
bared its rooty teeth, tending
to a slush of spiders and leaves,
near the shadowed murky stream
where mosquitos bred
and bred, and the ruby-
fattened females dropped
their rafts of eggs
before falling
to the mossy stones.
In that dim, musty spot,
I hid, watched older boys
peel clothes from their bodies.
Free, at night, they glowed
like pale cream, and I knew
I shouldn’t look
at what hung below their bellies
in matted swamps of hair:
it was ugly.
I wasn’t surprised.
Holli Carrell (she/they) was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah and now lives in the Midwest, where she recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. A 2024-2025 Taft Research Center Dissertation Fellow, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, The North American Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Bennington Review, and Salt Hill, among other journals.
t.r. san is a poet and translator currently based on Gadigal land, with recent work found in minor literature[s], The Cincinnati Review, HAD, Smokelong Quarterly, The Offing, &c. read & reach @thoushallkill on Twitter, or trsan.neocities.org.
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