Two Poems by Glenn Hollar

Bottle Rocket Ars Poetica

And if we banged

into the absurd,

we shall cover ourselves with the gold of owning nothing.

—Cesár Vallejo

I wonder if the great poets ever had this problem

I think, as a bottle rocket cuts a hole in the night

next to my right ear. Sure, Wilfred Owen

was pinned down more than once, and Pound

found his gods in the landscape outside Pisa,

but neither chose that. I step out from behind the corner

I’m using for cover, and set light to the fuse

of another scream, this one leaving a shower of sparks

as it skips off the screen door he’s hiding behind.

We’re the only people for miles.

Yeats was a dreamer and Dylan Thomas was a drunk,

but neither was this stupid. Soon, very soon, we will tire

of banging into the absurd. We’ll go back inside

to grab another beer from the Farmhouse fridge

and we will drown ourselves in gold.

I’ll leave it for tomorrow to find the poem—

the combustion of tiny fireworks,

the new hole burned through my favorite shirt.

The Deathmobile

I.

Color of a Metallica album,

I can almost see the lack

of shirt sleeves and good sense

due at signing

on an El Camino like this.

How proud he must have been!

How sensual that first touch

of chamois cloth to sheen,

tracing the seam

around the driver’s side door

as if in blessing.

He must have felt

like he had two cocks

when he’d rev it to redline,

dump the clutch, and peel

a strip of hide

off the gravel drive,

the pull of inertia

or some other fundamental Law

he didn’t comprehend

yanking him with a lurch

toward the main road,

and the highway that leads

to all highways.

II.

The car was all she left him in the divorce.

She had always said he spent more time with it,

and now he wouldn’t have her to stand between

him and his one true love. She was cheating on him

but didn’t want to admit it. So he lost himself

in its intricacies, the delicate interdependencies

of a harder heart than his. That summer he dismantled

the entire engine block, cleaned and polished every piece

with a relentless eye—then rebuilt the whole thing, just like new.

This is the part of the poem where I’m supposed to say

his catharsis was complete, that he managed to repair

the broken-down wreck of his life—because hasn’t the car

been a symbol all along for his psyche?

I don’t know. All I know is that, come fall,

that El Camino may have looked a little beat up

on the outside, but under the hood it ran like a Swiss watch.

Like something that hadn’t been pulled apart inside. Like new.

And that he sold it to Brandon for fifty bucks.

III.

And so it is written,

The Deathmobile,

in algae-colored spray paint

against the flat black primer

of the rest of the body,

tattooed across the dented tailgate—

only slightly more garish

in its audacity

than the skull and crossbones on the hood.

IV.

Brandon is a collector

of stray cars, in the same way

some people choose pets

they see themselves in.

After Amber dumped him

to marry her second cousin, he wanted

to celebrate mediocrity.

He wanted to own a stereotype

he could beat the shit out of.

So he gave that car the worst half

of a paint job, got drunk

every day, and took it out

on the roughest roads in the county.

Funny thing, how love can echo

itself. Like hand-me-down clothes

that never quite fit right.

Funny how they tell alcoholics

that the definition of insanity

is repeating the same action,

expecting different results—

but fail to mention that flipping a car

into a river in January isn’t too sane either.

Funny how blurred the trees are,

how riotous the engine pounds

with the hammer down,

as he speeds home to the Farmhouse,

The Black Album

blowing the speakers out,

windows wide open, almost doing ninety.

Glenn Hollar is a biographer's nightmare. Not for the reason you're thinking. This much is certain, though: he received his MFA from the University of Maryland in 2011, he currently lives in Tampa, FL, which he's not entirely convinced isn't hell in disguise (what happened to the mountains?), and he has had one of his poems published in Inch. Which is exactly the amount of newspaper column space his obituary will occupy.