Julie Howd was born and raised in Massachusetts. She earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Texas, Austin, and has received fellowships from the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and James A. Michener Center. In 2015 she won the Roy Crane Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Creative Arts. Her poems have been featured in Texas’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology, Sixth Finch, inter|rupture,Forklift, Ohio, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin, TX.
Able to Hold or Receive
The sleep-spider is not a spider, though it may move and act and be
Incredibly large when here it comes! The moon might have been
A discus I kissed and tossed to Ovid, but my bicep
Couldn’t swing it and there it hangs looped in gravity
Pestering the tops of our heads, our Nike visors. Ovid sits cross-
Ankled in Twenty-first Century Heaven kickin’ it with Jesus and Michael
Jackson and maybe some people who prayed wrong, maybe not.
No one knows where the Devil sits, but some say they feel it
In their shadows very close. Even in the clouds there are shadows
In the head. Let’s get some guns and rainbow bullets, said Gabriel.
And so they did.