GAS Featured Poet: Justin Hollis

 

Justin Hollis has an MFA from Hofstra University and currently teaches language and literature at Palm Beach State College.  His work has appeared previously in the Querencia Press Quarterly Anthology, Action, Spectacle, and The Chiron Review.  

These poems are from a manuscript entitled “Dream Economy: Prose Poems,” a collection of sixty surrealistic fables in the tradition of Russell Edson, Charles Simic, and Carsten Rene Nielsen.

There’s a miniature sabretooth tiger thawing from an ice cube on the counter and a wheelchair with a warm drink.  There’s a rat gnawing at the wheelchair tire, its air-bloat belly.  Inside the ice the tiger flexes a muscle; the rat floats up towards the ceiling.  There’s something prehistoric about the apartment, the guests swaggering simian-like, swigging their beer bottles then swinging them like caveman clubs at the rat’s primeval piñata: and there’s a woman outside the window looking in, thinking just this.  Though this could just be the woman, who wasn’t invited to the party in the first place, sulking in her bitterness.  Because, honestly, aren’t you too even a little curious?  The drink left on the wheelchair, now on the verge of tipping.  The sabretooth tiger, it’s story….

 

 

My son is telling me about something that happened on the class trip or at the Little League game or about Tuesday’s math test that he completely forgot to study for and so would I please just sign above the D before mom finds out.  I’m tuned out, drowning my thoughts in a cool bowl of Frosted Flakes.  Because “They’re Great,” says the Tiger.  My psychiatrist says it’s perfectly normal for a man of my age and middling social standing to indulge in occasional delusions of fancy.  But my delusions take the shape of a blue goldfish swimming among the soggy flakes.   “And then,” my son says, “right there in front of the entire class, Miss Gumble slipped…”.  I’m slipping now, deeper into the blue goldfish, happy to be a blue goldfish, happily swimming among the sparkling clusters of malted corn.  Tiny islands on which one could pull up a lounge chair and bask in the gauzy blue light that lights all my best memories.  Goldfish, you know, only have a memory span of about 9 seconds.  So I guess I have only 8, 7, 6… to explain to my son about his father, how at just around his age he learned to grow fins and breathe underwater, swim in the looming presence of a cartoon Tiger who for all I know is about to pounce off the front of the box and chase him out the kitchen, and me happy, forgetting.    

 

GAS Featured Poet: Vernon Frazer

 

Vernon Frazer's thirty-plus books of poetry include Mantic Pandemic, Memo from Alamut, IMPROVISATIONS,  Nemo under the League and SIGHTING. He is a member of the C22 Experimental Writing Collective. His fiction includes three novels and a short story collection. His jazz poetry appeared on three recordings, then extended into multimedia presentations viewable on YouTube. Frazer lives in Central Connecticut. He is widowed.

Payback in Training

fury starter 

vibrato slim crawl cadet 

    derision outpost

trouble pastiche

sharpened calico rudeness

emerging

              easily acquired

     monetary reality

     a discursive grogginess

     forking green

looming exchanges

before the argument

shaded 

            a gray run

one bored pose unfolding 

     the stress footage

     sweat of gratuitous exchanges

     breaking rhetoric vesicles

           provoked would be

           sizzle to invoke disposal

           where brackets hide

                    truthful excess learning

                           its mat commando skill

On Cue

coming from the corner

carom bulge collision spray

a rolling spread toward 

shoes and motor shores

clenched like an island rotary

cuffed against the cushion 

bounced balls into pocket

pool back turned to get 

its quiet corner action

rafting back a new score

numbered oddly to even

foreign fats and slims 

back to brag and green

against all angles boast

as competition collects

numbered table covers

sliced to carry where home

returns to its own pocket

Impact Statement Missing

animus hurled a hammer

at a vagary charge in action 

clipping a contact deflector

in trademark disposal

vacant once rummaging 

friction cathodes vacate

pineal findings extend

with plumage stashed dark

courage past the attention

the coastal menace forgot 

crises the witnesses displaced

near the lizard photoplay

diners howl dull oratorios

while the glittering dinner

honors a turnpike caddy

The Last Tattoo by Su Zi

 

The Last Tattoo

It might be that some of us have scars—surgical or experiential—as souvenirs of where we have been. Certainly, as children, some of us might have been privy to those intimate histories of where the scar was born, how it came into existence, how we grow around it if we are lucky enough to become old trees.

It also might be that some of us have tattoos—one or many, faded or still fresh—and these too ride shotgun to every moment ever after. For those you have considered, but yet to have encountered the tattoo experience: it is intimate. For those with a few tattoos, we know of what sense of resonance we must have with the totem to choose it.

And also, it might be that there are a few tattoo collectors—people who have many tattoos. Sometimes we might see a sleeve—an entire arm—in a swirl of markings, some intricate, some boldly graphic, a personal totem of the body.

I have many tattoos. Some of them I can only see with multiple mirrors, or in photographs. There are some in places few people will see ever, although there are photographs. As a tattooed person, you will be photographed—first by the artist who takes a picture for their portfolio, which is only of your fresh tattoo prior to bandaging. It might be that you attend events specifically for tattooing, and these have a history unto themselves, as all ritual events do. At one point, there was a convention of women tattoo artists only: Marked for Life. At such conventions, there are photographers. Some of the photographers exhibit through galleries and publication. I am told that I, as a tattooed person—in addition to specific tattoos—have appeared, perpetual apparition, me—in Italy, a place I shall never see.

Eventually, it might be that some of us grow into health issues. It might be that a surgeon scars a tattoo, or that life scars a tattoo. When we wear a tattoo for years and years, it is no longer a totem on our skin, it is our skin. While archeologists have found tattooed bones, our eventual future, we are still in our skins.

But, it might be that the rigors of that intimate ritual are eventually beyond us—perhaps there is only skin on bone now.

No more new tattoos.

And so, what of what is now the last one—

For me, it is a shared tattoo with someone no longer in my life

For me, it is a mark made in grief for a life lost

It is a standard flash broken heart that can only be seen if I am warm enough to wear short sleeves. We were walk-ins right before closing, in pre-plague times when every shop had to smell of green soap. The tattoo is on my forearm, right between the elbow and the crook with visible blue veins. I cannot remember the name of the artist. The shop is now closed.

But the tattoo rides with me in everything I do—because the grief it totemized rides with me in everything I do. People might see it riding my arm between Kimo’s forearm rose and the upper sleeve done long ago by Patty Kelley; there’s rich history in all the arts, and this includes tattoos and their artists. 

And while there are many opportunities for remembrance in our ordinary days, some ritual holidays might echo deeper for our own personal ghosts. We all honor our own histories in our own ways; for some of us, we wear them as well.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.