In first grade

we had to make
a little booklet
about our dads.

You take a sheet
of paper, fold it
fold it again

and then draw
a picture
on every page.

Well, on the

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 be the morning before violence. on this morning, the edge of

I’ve been shocked by reactions to This Is The End on two separate occasions. The first was after I’d seen the movie (three times) and a male acquaintance was shocked that a girl would even like it,

"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 flamingo feces. His snide asides
fell on foreign ears, for

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

NOTE: This is the second of four installments in this series. We will be featuring two hamburger joints at a time. Read the first installment HERE.

ABSTRACT

Within the pages of this

Sound for Fishes

Swim with a rock clutched between your teeth, apple-like. Have a friend do the same. Bang your rock against his rock. It will look like bad CPR. Sound is loudest

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 older
than I know how to be. He wants Texas in here;
[defend

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 slattern hells?

Remember being mammalian?

This gizmo stuck in my fuss like a picnic,

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. His surgical scars had healed. He felt like food again. Strangely, the older and

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 featuring two hamburger joints at a time, every other week, for the next 8 weeks. Enjoy.

ABSTRACT

Within the pages

& 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 career, he's already written two books of nonfiction, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America and

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 Phil. His dad was so poor that their house had turned into a

"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."

To brood in a cool bath, / imagined all virginal as when a child, // tangle of one single hair calligraphic against hip...