Slumber Party
Poetry by Patrick Holianthe sheep grazed in the misty, verdant valley in a prayerful, velvety quiet. I turned
thirteen in a casino in Reno, Nevada,
in the Silver Legacy, and I read my futures in the fiber of the carpet, before I
hospitalized myself at the all-you-can-
eat buffet. something is coming for you, it’s worse than worst, and better than best.
at the slumber party I wanted to tell
them about all the cute boys I had a crush on, but my mouth wasn’t mine, so I told
them about the only time I seen
the green flash, how I was at the sea, and it was the same night some kid drowned
at one end of the beach, and how
a shark beached itself and died on the other end, like they made some kind of pact.
the orchestra rent the air with
something glowering and ominous that tentacled into the ears and down the throats
of the audience. we trained the
dogs to run through forests that had been ravaged by wildfires, we put these little coats
on the dogs, their names were
stitched into the coats, we filled the pockets of the coats with seeds, and then let them
sprint through the woods,
spreading the seeds as they went. the potato chips and demons become more perverse
and spectacular by the day,
the night grows hungry, we feed it one slumber party after another, we feed it chisme
and glossy, chasms of love
and the disintegration of memory, a tugboat, sighs, sportsmanship, rolodexes, and
gum disease, and then
we crouch down in the mist, all of us, and we wait to see if it was enough.
Patrick Martin 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, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and he received a 2025 Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.