Sound for Fishes

Swim with a rock clutched between your teeth, apple-like. Have a friend do the same. Bang your rock against his rock. It will look like bad CPR. Sound is loudest

Anything worth saying can be rendered / as an aphorism, might itself be an aphorism, / just so you know     My phrase of the moment / is radiant action...

The new neighbors were moving vans and glimpses behind curtains. In time, they became an electronic fiction behind a white trellis fence. My dog could smell their vacancies.

My boyfriend cut off my arm while I slept. He had thought the whole thing through months in advance, he told me the next morning.

He slides an open palm up and down wallpaper that appears to depict horsemen and battalions in battle. He presses an ear to it. He tilts a framed print of Caravaggio’s Holofernes away from the wall.

George Strait’s in this poem now, he’s meddling
with everything.  He’s reading words
with the wrong inflections, making me older
than I know how to be. He wants Texas in here;
[defend

Remember being mammalian in the friar patch?

Remember your best reserve for slattern hells?

Remember being mammalian?

This gizmo stuck in my fuss like a picnic,

I turned my head so fast / I mistook the moon / for a firework / and then I wanted // to bark too...

Daniel heard it driving home...

Encore

He got a nice new haircut. His laryngitis was gone. His heart hurt less and the same with his head. His surgical scars had healed. He felt like food again. Strangely, the older and

You could still hear the sounds of their screams, over the water, as they tipped over the falls.

NOTE: This is the first of four installments in this series. We will be featuring two hamburger joints at a time, every other week, for the next 8 weeks. Enjoy.

ABSTRACT

Within the pages

& I am in this seat / doing the yeoman’s work / of relocating, of settling / for Florida’s budburst protocol // when I’d rather be on my back / in Arkansas or Illinois, Alabama...

B.J. Hollars has no problem crossing literary boundaries. In his short career, he's already written two books of nonfiction, Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America and

When Homer went blind, Langley’s remedy was one hundred oranges a week.

Four teenagers named “Phil” were tired of their dads not being rich.

“It is very frustrating to have a poor dad,” said Phil. His dad was so poor that their house had turned into a

"As a term, postmodernism came into my vocabulary in 1988.  It had not yet moved from art and English and music into theology the way it has in recent years by then, but it was, of course, still extant in the visual codes of culture."

To brood in a cool bath, / imagined all virginal as when a child, // tangle of one single hair calligraphic against hip...

Sterling-Silver Crook-Handle Bespoke Umbrella with Silk Canopy: $2,295

We hope that you never need use this umbrella.  Surely, a lifetime of sunshine and warmth is preferred to the

Note: Below is the style sheet for my novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, prepared by my fantastic copyeditor, Susan Bradanini Betz. While her marked pages were making

You’re in a car tunneling in the wake of its own headlights. Last you remember, you were in a bar, in Oxford, Mississippi, and you had walked there. As you come to, you realize the car is full, and

Pingo went first. He always did. The rest of us stood at the top of the slope over the place where the sewer pipes from town spilled into the narrow creek that  disappeared into a deep ravine west

Bryan Furuness is a writer whose presence has long loomed large here at Hobart. He’s published work in the journal and on the website. We’re big admirers of his writing, so when we saw that his

All the money is wet & gummy / underneath the brightest pink trees. / They fade to breast cancer color when it rains.

On her bike in the rain, Sally could not shake the bus. The double-decker advanced no more confidently than Sally. She stopped to clear her bangs that conducted a stream down her open mouth.

In an interview with Luna Park in 2009, I was quoted as saying this:

I really do believe in the whole write-what-you-know thing. One time I wrote a story from the point of view of an old sick