Slow Pony
after the third or fourth cry,
I should be able to stand. my mother gave me a ram’s skull for my 18th birthday,
ordered me to wear it for a year,
sleep and eat and shower and seduce in it, add a very small tuft of fur each day.
my call will be unremarkable
and unmistakable, it will sound like me asking you the time or asking where the boat
will dock. consumed by April,
reconfigured by May into funhouse mirror or dusty corner of the Interwebz. qué padre,
the devil’s formula, el techo
ha tenido sangre seca en su piel, soy el rudo pero quiero ser el técnico. we pluck needles
of the nopal with our hands,
bare, we become indistinguishable from this snowy nightmare, for half a year the bones
in his shoulder chafe day and night,
a painful palimpsest of sorts. kids don’t party as much as we did, which is good, I guess.
I fed my dusty brown dog dandelions,
showed it the top of the fridge, lifted the cover on the toilet’s tank, revealed inner workings.
ocean after ocean, self-abnegation,
the sweet and sometimes but not super often deadly waddle of the alligator. wombats have
their pouches on backwards,
so when they dig their holes they don’t get dirt in their baby’s faces. how cool, the roof had
dried blood on its skin, I’m the heel
but I want to be the face. through realization comes the revealing, and like breathing on the glass
of your school bus as a kid and then
writing with your grimy finger, I think of all of you—a type of love, certainly—its inability to last
both byproduct and essence.
dear reader, one day my late mother charged me with casting a shadow over every square inch
of our home—crawl spaces
and basement and attic and ceilings and behind every appliance and beneath every piece of
furniture—before it was destroyed,
and today, my friend, my pal, my confidant, I must ask you to do the same.
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.