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.