Patrick Holian

Hamburger University

I.

Tell me everything you’ve eaten since the fires.
My grandmother’s china is filled with titan rain, worried
men with dark shadows beneath their eyes who carry
too much knowledge. This is horseshit, yet, the coarse Pacific
wind persists, lapping at my useless, hairy shins. Treachery:
the mansion from the acclaimed television show Dallas
isn’t even in fucking Dallas, it’s in Parker, Texas.

II.

Come come, everyone has a plan until they’re punched
in those trees that smell of rotting corpses or semen when
they bloom. Have you encountered the light? Have you
invited the light into your life? Delicious: the sound
of a fresh pair of laces piercing the eyelets of tennis shoes;
otters holding hands; the bruise on your thigh in the shape
of my enormous, gleeful mouth, the same shade as the Northern Lights.

III.

One man’s peace village is everyone else’s propaganda
village. Emptiness begets emptiness. We search the horizon
to fight off the nausea our collective company creates,
and for no other reason. Hamburger University alights on Chicago
with dove wings, its practice one of elegance and satisfaction and
systematization and possibility, both limitless and nonexistent.
After everyone else is gone, after the levees have succumbed

IV.

and the towers have been overrun by wisteria and kudzu
and all manner of varmints, I alone will be left to wade out into
the water in your favorite silk robe, reciting the history of the insurance
industry—nearly half Christ’s age—let my mouth fill with murky water
as I explain its relationship with commercial marine investments
to spoonbills and herons and sparrows. Delicious: Ellsworth’s insistence
that color is enough; witches laughing at the stake; the sound of your ass

getting fatter; the heartbeat pulsing at your strong, reliable, cherry
blossom neck as you sing Patsy beneath your breath to me and the moon.

Patrick Martin 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 PhD in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill Journal, The Arkansas Review, The Acentos Review, and PRISM international. He was a 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s fiction finalist, the runner-up in Black Warrior Review’s 2019 flash fiction contest, and a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize.