Fool’s Holy Day [Has Ended]

Jenn Givhan

remember the summer of pink eye
the summer of fried eggs & the crackling

blacktop I sucked till my mouth unglued
drunk on nothing drunk on the wedding cake I

froze & thirteen years later every jeweled egg
I’ve carried has popped like fancy caviar never tasted

such pinkening that bubbles as champagne
& cheers to the end of breaking [for] you

my eyes scrubbed my heart pass-
ported oh stamped for anywhere but—

Jenn Givhan, a Mexican American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Rosa’s Einstein (Camino del Sol, 2019), two chapbooks, and two novels, Trinity Sight and Jubilee, both forthcoming from Blackstone Press. Her poems appear in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetry, the New Republic, Crazyhorse, and the Kenyon Review. She has received, among other honors, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Emerging Voices Fellowship, and New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize for Poetry, chosen by Tyehimba Jess.