in parentheses

Hollie Dugas lives in New Mexico. Her work has been selected to be included in Barrow Street, Reed Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Redivider, Pembroke, Salamander, Poet Lore, Watershed Review, Mud Season Review, Little Patuxent Review, Chiron Review, Louisiana Literature, and CALYX. Hollie has been a finalist twice for the Peseroff Prize at Breakwater Review, Greg Grummer Poetry Prize at Phoebe, Fugue’s Annual Contest, and has received Honorable Mention in Broad River Review. Additionally, “A Woman’s Confession #5,162” was selected as the winner of Western Humanities Review Mountain West Writers’ Contest (2017). Recently, Hollie has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize and for inclusion in Best New Poets 2021. She is currently a member on the editorial board for Off the Coast.

Hollie Dugas has been previously featured in the Fall 2015 Anthology Issue of IP.

Artwork by Edward Michael Supranowicz

In the Name of Proximity

I.

Strangled fruit is exposed through the humble spaces between bars by a hand, the same probing hand that grants the captive his cold bruise.  The guard, a golem; his all-knowing eye flickering. Fingertips bury themselves into raw hides as unforeseen orgasms struggle into existence. The stroke of twelve; the stroke of curiosity.  A high-pitched yowl pushes through a diaphragm, puncturing the organ, demolishing the path for all other intelligible sound; the wounded deem this trivial.  Two murdered gasps float up and wallow on a cusp in some indiscernible place.  They don’t even hold each other afterwards; just residing to their own beds and falling asleep like pleased little boys.  The guard, in his pressed uniform, always tiptoeing over stale crackers once the dark night hangs over its duo.  Morning’s pulse swells yesterday’s black meat and the mice nibble the bottoms of cold rigid feet.

II.

A gentleman’s stare, pumped the fuel into a vehicle, wearing khaki shorts and bottle top eyeglasses, looking like everyone else. Perhaps, that’s why I killed the guy, he says, confined to a white prison, now. The borer of boredom.  The sultan of solitude.  Zapped into a crispness by the provoking shades of blue and gold, the sauntering smell of stone black shoe polish. The ritualistic clinking of the security baton, it chimed hypnotically against the metal bars. I was able to make out a word: sanctuary.  The spellbound blue, the triggering baton, the stone black smell, carved into the chronicle at the furthest corners of the room. My senses began to prick at me. That enrapturing bristle. It took me.  My socks fell down to my ankles.  

III.

Mice would be better off in a labyrinth feasting on white meat, where they can be dense and content.   Here, they don’t even bother to gather the bits of stale cracker from the concrete, gazing erratically toward the sky cautious of the marauder.  Like the guard, reduced to a victim of a surprising firmness thumbing beneath the shield, undressing himself, dominating the one bump of the droning day,  Scavenging, expecting to discover some unprincipled mole or birthmark only to find it conquerable, gullible, oppressed. The membranous grazing, the scraping chest hair; all suitable.  Until, the uncontrolled morning hangs its prisoner from a string with compliant eyes and a tongue that can barely be kept inside a mouth. 

In Parentheses Magazine (Volume 7, Issue 3) Winter 2022

By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7

32 pages, published 1/15/2022

The Winter 2022 issue of In Parentheses Literary Magazine. Published by In Parentheses (Volume 7, Issue32)