Ken Holland has had work widely published in such journals as Rattle, Tulane Review, Southwest Review, and Tar River with poetry current/forthcoming in Kestrel, California Quarterly, Midwest Quarterly, The Alembic, Good River Review, and Canary. 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. His book-length manuscript, Summer of the Gods, was a semi-finalist in the 2022 Able Muse book competition as well as Word Work’s 2022 Washington Prize. He’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. More at www.kenhollandpoet.com

Terracotta

A terracotta moon caps the night sky
Like an architectural ornament.

Think of the clay and the hands.
Think of the wheel on which it was shaped.

Sometimes I recall the heat
That hardened the planes of my face.

Sometimes I remember how I sheared
My way into existence.

The kiln first firing the eyes
Before they glazed with color.

The form I was given was that
Of an injured animal.

The form I was given drew down
The moon in all its imperfection.

I slide my fingers along my body
The way the moon’s shadow slides across the Earth—

Without weight, without gravity
As if the clay were not crippled

As if my greed to be whole
Was a remnant of another life

Another slipstream, where the angels
Have yet to learn of their own imperfection.

The heat that held me
Now holds another.

All the heat that held within me
Is now held by the other.

The heat was the shape of my body
Now misshapen by its loss.

My mouth is carved open to the sky
And in its silence, never closes.

The Calliope of Silence

Poetry carries the airy weight of history
As if it were a physical burden

As if grief could be paid out in grams

A caisson bears the weight of the casket
While the riderless horse follows with its
Poetic weight of absence

Look closely. Those are God’s boots
Set backwards in the stirrups. The crowd stunned
To prayerful silence

The silence of poetry is the silence of God.
I hold both in the gathered fingers of my palms
As I would hold the transit of wind

I’m sorry if I’m leaning toward abstraction
But I’m no more than a coin that falls in its poverty
Towards the poverty of being mortal

The same coin I’ve slipped into the machine
At the penny arcade where the fortune teller
Divines the crystal imperfection of my future

Her head dips back into darkness like any prophet
Weary of the smallness of our lives
As I reach into my pocket for one more coin
For all that was left unsaid

A steam-powered calliope arcs its sound
Over the weathered gray wood of the boardwalk
Like a muezzin calling the pure to prayer
Like sermons spoken down to dust

Salt air rises from three thousand miles of ocean
And in its sleight of hand, cannot be touched or gathered
Even as it settles like faith inside my lungs

Like the black mortar of the night sky
Pouring down weightlessly upon the water.

The Fool

My neighbor downstairs is coughing up forty years
Of nicotine through her lungs. It’s 2 a.m. The night
Is inhaling its own darkness, throws open a window
Of stars to air out the windless funk of its breath. Sound
Catches in the distance like metal trapped up against a
Power line. The moon is dressed in desert camo and
Will not reveal itself beyond how its lips sip at the ocean’s
Edge. I’m awaiting the kiss of high tide. I’m awaiting
Some form of ocean life to wave a pincer and sing
That way. You should go that way. Or maybe it’s
Gravity’s warm hand I’m waiting for, the way I’ll cup
Her fingers and then promenade along the beach
As lovers do. And never wonder where it is we’re going.
Never wanting to get there. Never wanting to say good night.
And for once I step out of myself, I step up to what I desire.
I tell her I love her. She is my Sea of Tranquility. The elemental
Force in my life. How she pulls back the dark skin of my thoughts.
I say all this and more, casting myself the fool.
                 And in the ensuing silence, I wait
For her to speak. The waves sigh like a Greek chorus
Of lamentation. A ship’s horn an echo of what’s lonely
And heroic. The first gull glides on the current of the coming dawn.
And in the silence that will not call to me, that sustains
Only itself, comes my neighbor’s rough-throated
Heave of solitude, waking not from a nightmare, but into one.