Poems by Ken Holland

The Boy Who Eats Black Soil

The boy who eats black soil
Who feeds a mineral heart
Hunger a metamorphic pressure
               Eyes turned to schist
               Blood to gray slate.

The boy who eats black soil
Another who eats only air
And once the marrow has been
Leached from his bones, he’ll
Spread the whisper of his arms
And glide on the currents of the sun.

This world of transience
Where a child’s cry
               ​held aloft
Turns and turns in the lunar light
Like a quasar, mute and distant,
The hunger of his mind
Collapsed in upon itself.

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The Voice of Her Name

The starving refugee is only starving
inside my plasma screen, the hand
she reaches out to me touched with
virtual hunger, eyes pixelated with tears.

I have no time to hold the hand
of the traumatized girl or stay tuned
long enough to hear if she’s
SyrianPalestinianPersecutedSectarian.

I have no time to guide the drone
though in my youth I was quite
the master of the joystick and employed
a touch both deft and knowing.

I have no time to stand before a gathering
of my peers and let them drink
the melting plastic of my guilt
before it reshapes into a map of America.

What I do have time for would take more time
than I have to tell. But it involves the modem
in my head and the router in my eyes
and the futile effort to unplug what’s wireless.

Tape loops no longer exist, now it’s all
digital binary code that enhances your
mother’s voice to a level of clarity
she never possessed when she was alive.

My one great-uncle drove a pink convertible Cadillac
my other great-uncle carried a gun beneath his suit.
Short Jewish men who cast a mirage of height
via the virtual reality of throttle and trigger.

Still, when he turned the key in the ignition
the sound was like sacred choral polyphony.

A sinuous streaming of harmonics.

The encoding of my desire to listen,
to interpret the braille of what can’t be touched
as I cannot touch the girl whose face
is the face of hunger, whose braille
is the voice of her name.

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As If Dreams Had Any Meaning

I read and nap, read
and nap, and so the day passes;
though at day’s end there is
no network of news that recounts
the number of Congolese who die,
mining with their hands the rare minerals
that encode our desires. Or the names that day
of the raped in prison, in whichever country
you wish to choose, whichever gender
you care to know about. Or those who simply
didn’t have enough to eat as you wash your dishes
in the sink. The cat waiting to be fed.
Returning then to the room where you watch the news,
though there’s nothing new in the news of iniquity,
or the fine art we’ve made of flaying
one’s soul, so why would the news bother
reporting on things so very old?
So off goes the TV, as if offing someone’s head,
and off once more I head to bed, where I dream
the same dreams that everyone does, the ones
you can’t remember when morning comes.

Ken Holland has had work widely published in such journals as Rattle, Tulane Review, Southwest Review, and Tar River Poetry. He was awarded first place in the 2022 New Ohio Review poetry contest, judged by Kim Addonizio, and was a finalist in the 2022 Lascaux Prize in Poetry. He’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and lives in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. More by visiting his website: www.kenhollandpoet.com

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