"Wet Water Hill" by Lily Duffy
"Wet Water Hill" by Lily Duffy
Part coming-of-age story, part locked-door mystery, part rumination on femininity and fleshy excess, Lily Duffy’s Wet Water Hill — a hybrid work that takes place in a closed waterpark — is the perfect apocalyptic beach read for your #GothGirlSummer. 32 pages. Bound with blue staples. Letterpressed cover.
The theme was water pro tem. You can’t reach up to heaven. 562 steps and you’re barely to the water tower. So for now, water on earth, water as gathering. A park offering 31 implements with varying degrees of submersion — slip, slide, dunk, float, spray, mist, splash, surf, soak, swim, wrestle — directly off of that scythe-shaped exit. Down the barrel road lined with stands of rotting fruit, preloaded with vehicles by 6:30 on the closing Sunday in August so the peaches, plums, and blackberries marinate in fumes. The attendant steps into his booth at 9:59 to grant entry to the first ride: the driveway.
Lily Duffy is a poet, editor, and social worker living in Denver. She's the author of the full-length poetry collection TACT (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and a chapbook, Sour Candy (Really Serious Literature, 2018). Her writing can be found in Anomaly, APARTMENT Poetry, Yalobusha Review, Denver Quarterly, The Journal Petra, and TENDE RLOIN, among other journals. With the writer Ray Levy, Lily edits DREGINALD, an online magazine of poetry, prose, and art they founded together in 2013.