BIO
Patrick Holian is a Mexican American writer from San Francisco, California, where he currently resides. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Mary’s College of California and a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Arkansas Review, Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, Moon City Review, Yalobusha Review, Apricity Magazine, Salt Hill Journal, and Bennington Review. Patrick was a finalist in the 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s contest and a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize.
Tension
I told myself I wouldn’t
resort to perfection.
In this version of the story,
I am the deadbeat.
Palm trees and animosity
succumb to the fog.
You will always be my
chamber, my nightshade.
In this economy, an economy
of dispossession,
well, we’ll just throw some
confetti on the wound,
ford into the river of our
memories, kill something
nameless in the rapids. We’ve
completely misunderstood
the laws of extinction. I
rubbed my forehead against
your belly, rubbed my belly
against your forehead,
asked if arrivals were always
such violent things.
I ate donuts in my bad
underwear on a stool
while you painted me and
listened to me prattle on
about the collapse of stars
and your boobies
and a garden I’d never plant
and etcetera.
We, as humans, deserve sleep, wouldn’t you say?
For a long time, I’ve
subscribed to my own stupidity,
resorted to foulness,
perfection, aspartame. Somehow,
despite my efforts, I’ve been
your chamber, I’ve built a tolerance for nightshade.
And when you hold the wind,
the fog, in your strong, lithe hands, sometimes I wonder.