Side Pony
“Blessed be the geological disturbances!” Luis Barragán
I said to you and your magma eyes, fatten me up for slaughter, use the pulp of the nameless
fruit, color of indigo blanketed
by a nearly inconspicuous layer of ash or Oreo crumbs. to be honest, gaze soberly and preciously
into the scum. plop. my primary
need is to be bound, reification of chimichangas. use Beauty as you might a utensil, a turn signal,
a nightly face mask. perversion
led to a limpid darkness, at first light on a rocky Rhode Island shore, feet cut and bleeding into
creeping Atlantic, spiritual testimony
cartwheeled out of me. the sunroom’s glass was blown into the shape of a rhinoceros beetle,
fitted snugly, serenely, onto inconceivable
boulder. we mean privatization, ask your mother, pull free the entrails of mystery and don’t
sanitize them. foghorns led me
dreamward, a sky obese, a lament written underwater so as to be indecipherable and thereby
all-cohering. gloomy synthesizers
burrowed into my ears, a side pony of lava spilled free, shelter sought me out. the narrow streets
were delusional with bougainvillea
and thick ebony-green vines, we’d hidden the hiding places far too well, I had stowed the
manual of eroticism in the back
of my ever-expanding waistband, I had forgotten myself, but I hadn’t forgotten the slaughter,
and as they prepared to break me
loose, I told them how you had used tweezers to pluck every bit of pulp from the fruit free,
how it was as big as a jaguar’s head
and had taken you two hundred years, I told them how you left the task and me and slaughter
old and frail and free.
Patrick Holian (he/him/his) is a Mexican American writer from San Francisco, California. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Barrelhouse, Bennington Review, The Acentos Review, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere. He was a 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s fiction finalist, a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, and received a 2025 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.