‘Hollowing’
— Hannah Cohen
like any true
wild thing. heading always
out and always in
I’ve been aware of the work that Bombus Press has published since their inaugural issue, but it’s this particular poem by Shay Vera-Cruz that has me looking forward to their poems in Platypus’s future anthology A Portrait in Blues. The poem seems simple enough: short-ish, two line stanzas with calculated end words, but it’s the partnership between self-reflection and the white space that make declarations such as “I saw the / dark of the night and I / wanted it” piercing and gem-like. It takes hard work and talent to use too-poetic words like “night”, “raw”, and “light” and reinvent them, an art Vera-Cruz is mastering. They give this poem heartbeats and breaths, and it will take more than one read to find all that ‘Hollowing’ gives.