Poetry by Holly Hunt

Holly Hunt, essayist and poet, is from the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, The Kansas City Star and Arkansas Democrat newspapers, and other journals. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. She lives in Hot Springs with her genius cat and her husband who was raised by wolves and The Grateful Dead in California.

His Eventual Mastery of Time and Concentration

Time got away from James when he was a little cork
in a bestiary of feral half-siblings in a house
where all of the clocks were fifteen minutes slow
or fast depending upon the cycle of some
solar system way beyond. When he reached twenty-four
he’d had his fill of diluvial loose
ends and four ex-daddies and Mama's
many doors that swung both ways
for all of her lost and found friends
that came too early and stayed too late.

One Sunday in his twenty-seventh year
early hour while Brother Jimmy Swaggart
warbled in Corinthians' Louisiana honey,
James took control of time and dragged
his second wife Marcia and all four children
into the living room saying, Y’all get one warning.
His mother and mother-in-law also in tow,
he sat them down in the tightest row
along the Naugahyde club-style divan.
He pulled out a pistol to fixate
that wavy line-up of corundum eyes
and he demanded for once in his life
Somebody figure out the time has finally
come around here for a moment of quiet.

At gunpoint were they so apprised
how they were all about to Shut
the fuck up and without brushing
down a static flaring span of hair
Get ready to go to a real live Sunday School,
and not some piece of shit on the air!
He corralled them even the bewildered
three-year-old still in his jammies-with-feet.
And there in the house on highway seven
he advised them on the lost art form
of how to keep time and concentration:
Now get down on your knees
and pray to God I don't
blow your heads off."
Cocked the trigger
just to get the two old mamas started
on the concept of finite boundaries.

I knew James as a shy little thing,
from the times I ate dinner
at their house long years back
in my teenage frivolity when he was
insignificant among dinners surrounded
by multiplying canines licking my sandal toes
and scarfing up the spilled whatever
and horny miniature poodles
humping on my jeans leg
under the generous table overflowing.
Never had anyone in that household
addressed the Holy Deity.
Not in a kitchen where the air
seemed to crackle with barbaric
crispies leaping harum-scarum
and paper plates defying gravity.

But somehow on his grownup hostage morning
James’ little family kneeled in a bald-spotted yard
before a young daddy on the crumbly
who was just about fed up
with this ambush this blizzard of dingbats
granular blobs wads of unwashed apparel
crapola tripping every step he ever took.
How suddenly did they find their tongues
mindful of atonement forming
some sacred appeal bowing heads
their eyes all tightly shut.

When his wife Marcia drove the carload
into the gravel lot of the Church of God
only then did he dump out the chamber
before his own explosion to tears.
Bullets thumped to the floorboard a fine-spun singing
away to rounded corners benign. His brain always
swamped by maternal power the overwhelming loud
kind who let things fly to hell with unkept time.
He stared at his left hand opening
the glove compartment as a calm right
hand placed the gun into dark oblong-itivity.
After church later on that Sunday night
he saw what he would take into the deep:
his six-year-old in her Spider-Man
pajamas so carefully sweeping
a dustpan full of faith in him,
the scattered months of birdseed.

Some right angles were about to fall in place
as he built plywood toyboxes the next afternoon.
Wednesday would begin the chain-link
fences to keep out the coyotes.
He started working with a timer and was led
into a deeper telescopic hunger.
He focused through the cold nights lone wolfish
for the craters of a distant white silence.