HOLLY AS EVERY MORNING AND EVERY EVENING, THE SCENE IS THE SAME

grace (ge) gilbert

Fragments of old pages cascading down the page. Each segment has written text. Segment one: "HOLLY AS EVERY MORNING AND EVERY EVENING, THE SCENE IS THE SAME" Segment two: "My father takes part in a ritual at the mantle." Segment three: "Here a black-and-white portrait of my grandmother rests, the only frame among the handful of family photos--my sister in a pumpkin patch, my mother holding my infant-self inches from the shore of Lake Erie, a still of my siblings and me baby-limbed and shirtless, running through a sprinkler--that remains dust-free, wholly centered, wholly kept." Segment four: "Tucked behind the silvered frame is an orange pop-cap prescription bottle, the label so faded its original intent is illegible. My father unscrews the cap and dips a finger inside, where a small well of holy water brims below the label's edge." Fragments of old pages cascading down the page. Each segment has written text. Segment one: "With a slight genuflect he smudges a tiny cross (up, down, left, right) on the image on my grandmother's forehead." Segment two: "He mumbles some words. I never quite make out what he says. When he turns away from the brick façade, I make myself small as can be in the stairwell." Fragments of old pages cascading down the page. Each segment has written text. Segment one: "There is a mutual secrecy, a quiet logic to our ritual." Segment two: "I never quite know what he says." Segment three: "He never quite knows I am watching." An old fragment of a newspaper that has been painted on in places. Some of the sections describe an accident, and some of the sections advertise for businesses. In front of the newspaper is a cut-out image of a child with a dog.

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Headshot of grace (ge) gilbert

grace (ge) gilbert (they/them) is a poet, writer and collage artist. they received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022, where they now teach. they are the author of Holly (YesYes Books, 2026), a hybrid image and text book about the 1976 murder of their paternal grandmother, as well as three chapbooks. recent work can be found in the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, the Drift, the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Pleiades, the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. They teach hybrid collage and poetics courses at Brooklyn Poets, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Poet’s House, and other institutions. They are passionate about making the hybrid arts accessible to all.

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Holly
YesYes Books

Portland, Oregon

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grace (ge) gilbert’s Holly merges poetry, memoir, and visual art in an effort to recreate the author’s grandmother, who was murdered in her home in 1976, and to make sense of their ensuing relationship with their father, who found his mother’s body when he was eleven years old. Having never been told explicitly by their parents about her murder, gilbert pieces together her grandmother’s story through fragment, ephemera, history, and the imaginary, looking past the spectacle of the murdered woman and into the things that come, like ripples, after.

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