Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota who teaches needlepoint classes for
the Minneapolis school district and writing classes at The Loft Literary Center. Her poetry has recently appeared
in Hawai’i Pacific Review, Slant, and The Tampa Review, and she is the 2011 recipient of the Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published books are Walking Twin Cities and Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch.
I once was a woman who prayed and prayed for just one little baby maybe a girl but when the baby finally came it came much too soon she was only two inches long and so quiet I held my daughter curled tiny in my palm begged her to breathe begged her to move said I’d make her a cradle out of a walnut shell and a goose feather for a quilt if she would just give me a sign some sign that we could be I spent all night by the window, sang lullabies murmured half-remembered nursery rhymes my daughter cupped in the palm of my hand too small to be anything but a dream.
THUMBELINA
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