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Poem by L.K Holt

Eyewear is very glad to welcome L.K. Holt (pictured) this Friday. Holt is one of the more impressive of the younger poets to emerge from Australia recently.

Holt lives in Melbourne where she was born in 1982. Her childhood and growing up were mainly spent in Adelaide. She is a graduate in History from the University of Melbourne.

Holt's collection, Stories of Bird, was published in 2005 as part of a Poets Union (NSW) Emerging Writers' Fellowship. Her "Self-Portrait with Red Bird" won the 2005 Woorilla Prize. Her poems can be found in journals such softblow, Nthposition, Meanjin, Verandah, Poetrix and My Perfect Diary.

Her latest collection, Man Wolf Man, from John Leonard Press, was published in 2007.


The Ontological Whore

The witch stole three penises at the Devil’s order:
she kept them in a bird-nest and like babies they squirmed for her.
That morning she pissed on the Book in her Sunday best
then told a neighbour that her consecrated wafer was baked

god. She met with the Devil in her midnight leisure.
He only entered her with God’s permission: a peep-show
for His vicarious pleasure. (The Devil himself is a work
of God, a boastful self-portrait of the man He wishes He was).

Her opening was the very point of contact between Hell and men,
between death and life; the pain of a two-worldly pivot inside of her
not surprising then. Apparently the Devil was more man than man
and devil-flesh was cold but soft like new-death! The theologians sat

as disciples at her feet, begging for the story again. They loved
her as the Devil’s whore: she proved he was corporeal,
the real thing. Which proved, antithetically, the sweet body
of God’s son, and his Word that billowed her skirts as she hung.

poem by L.K. Holt
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