Ken Holland
Ken Holland has had work widely published in such journals as Rattle, Atlanta Review, and Pedestal Magazine. He was awarded first place in several competitions including New Ohio Review, Kim Addonizio judge. His chapbook, “Rust and Slag”, was a finalist in the 2024 Concrete Wolf competition as well as the 2025 Moonstone Press competition which Moonstone is publishing. His poem, “Sepia Life” was a finalist in Bicoastal Review’s 2025 contest. He’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and lives in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. More by visiting: kenhollandpoet.com
Breach
You’re blowing black smoke from out back of the car,
the tailpipe like the thick nib of a fountain pen scrawling
its toxic signature across the sky. On the right
you’re passing through one part of the Western
Apache nation, while on the left corporate America
is looking to blast away all that heritage to get at the copper
that lies beneath, the same copper that comprises
the very wiring running up to your headlights,
how all that illumination is sourced in the scarring
of something sacred, and you know little enough
of your own god let alone someone else’s, and
when your mother asked you do you believe?
you said to her in what? and were sorry for the sadness
you brought to her eyes. Years ago. How the only
indigenous claims you have on this country are
the bodies you’ve buried beneath it. White skin,
black soil. Headstones that themselves claim
baseless ownership to the land, though the names
could never be chiseled deep enough to last, everything returns
to the earth, no matter what we pull from it, no matter
how much the machinery digs into what’s buried,
nothing lasts except the kind of myth you’re not entitled to,
which you couldn’t possibly embody,
myth as ambiguous as the black smoke blowing out the back of your car,
all that darkness burrowing into the darker breach of the night.
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Image by Getty Images from Unsplash
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