Patrick Holian
The Forest Lured Us In With Promises Of Privacy
I gathered everything you dropped along the way, put it into this old leather suitcase with a potpourri made from
the shadowy, prismatic, sultry, mesmerizing, and wet soundtracks to the gay porno films of the late 70s and early
80s. adversarial delights? I’ve known a few. consummate scumbag, the pink and aquamarine fibers of your
grandmother’s church coat, a laser made of soprasetta and the warped, distilled gossip of dolphins. el suelo
del bosque nos comerá sin pensar. you kissed my lower lip, tore it off quick and clean from my jaw, chiseled space
hearts and patty melts into the bone. gutted, I huffed shark teeth and time and mums and Taco Bell for months.
I began to suspect the meditations were making me into a kind of hell, so I proceeded. the oldest profession in the
world is being attracted to things that hurt us, it’s just something we’ve never been compensated for. it’s not to
elicit sadness or fear or anything at all when I say that the forest floor will eat us without thinking.
Patrick Martin Holian 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 writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and Southeast Review. He is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, and received a 2025 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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