He led her blindfolded through the kitchen, down the steps to the backyard. “Birthday girl,” he had whispered to her this morning, offering her coffee in bed. 

In first grade

we had to make
a little booklet
about our dads.

You take a sheet
of paper, fold it
fold it... more

will become

the morning your boots are filled with so much gravity that it is impossible to walk up or fall down a hill, will... more

I’ve been shocked by reactions to This Is The End on two separate occasions. The first was... more

"Hills Like White Elephants" on a waffle.

The gouges / in the floor will become your scars, even as you erase / the life you had together. The floor is your map.

Parricide

Finally they took over the city of my father,
filled it with mosquitoes and bush fog, threw him
in a river of... more

One summer, under the streetlamps, the storm clouds, our friend on life support...

Sound for Fishes

Swim with a rock clutched between your teeth, apple-like. Have a friend do the same. Bang... more

NOTE: This is the second of four installments in this series. We will... more

Anything worth saying can be rendered / as an aphorism, might itself be an aphorism, / just so you know     My phrase of the moment / is radiant action...

The new neighbors were moving vans and glimpses behind curtains. In time, they became an electronic fiction behind a white trellis fence. My dog could smell their vacancies.

My boyfriend cut off my arm while I slept. He had thought the whole thing through months in advance, he told me the next morning.

George Strait’s in this poem now, he’s meddling
with everything.  He’s reading words
with the wrong inflections, making me... more

He slides an open palm up and down wallpaper that appears to depict horsemen and battalions in battle. He presses an ear to it. He tilts a framed print of Caravaggio’s Holofernes away from the wall.

Remember being mammalian in the friar patch?

Remember your best reserve for... more

I turned my head so fast / I mistook the moon / for a firework / and then I wanted // to bark too...

Daniel heard it driving home...

Encore

He got a nice new haircut. His laryngitis was gone. His heart hurt less and the same with his head.... more

You could still hear the sounds of their screams, over the water, as they tipped over the falls.

NOTE: This is the first of four installments in this series. We will be... more

& I am in this seat / doing the yeoman’s work / of relocating, of settling / for Florida’s budburst protocol // when I’d rather be on my back / in Arkansas or Illinois, Alabama...

B.J. Hollars has no problem crossing literary boundaries. In his short... more

When Homer went blind, Langley’s remedy was one hundred oranges a week.

Four teenagers named “Phil” were tired of their dads not being rich.

“It is very frustrating to have a poor dad,” said... more

"As a term, postmodernism came into my vocabulary in 1988.  It had not yet moved from art and English and music into theology the way it has in recent years by then, but it was, of course, still extant in the visual codes of culture."