Anticipation

I trust the perils of good love: we can’t properly study a proverb without
rendering it powerless. I have always been ghoulish,

a true menace, a silent rebellion. my friend, commandeer slabs and slabs
of leather daddies and mount what bison have survived,

ride them straight into the sunrise or the clouds, whichever comes first.
set the cemetery ablaze, not to defile, but because the dead

have asked for the warmth. a humdinger demeanor and a whole lot of
nope lead me to believe in anticipation. what is it that you

use to suture these days and this life? have I praised in strip mall massage
and tattoo parlors? the stampede of moths pouring forth

from the mouth of the cave would say yes. I mumbled myself hoarse
during a hurricane in order to learn how to be a more

patient man. I would eat your horchata-colored eyes and have always
been a sucker for the banal seduction of empty

mornings. even after the game the free safety roams the field in the silent,
darkened coliseum, foraging for violence. autumn 

and winter kicked rocks, summer too, and we found ourselves en primavera
eterna, in eternal spring, and as we succumbed

to the ceaseless growth all of us wept, some out of fear, but many of us from awe and fatigue.

Patrick Holian (he/him/his) is a Mexican American writer from San Francisco, California. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from St. Mary’s College of California and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, december magazine, Salt Hill Journal, Bennington Review, The Acentos Review, and PRISM international, he was a 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s fiction finalist, and a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize.