[POETRY]

[03/16/26]

From Dream Economy

Poems by Justin Hollis

I find a hundred-dollar bill underneath a jar of cucumbers pickling in the pantry. Later on, at the bank, depositing the hundred, the teller scrutinizes the note then says she is sorry, it’s clearly a forgery. How odd, I think, but she must have tripped the silent alarm, because before I even have the chance to explain myself, security is upon me. “This is an injustice,” I scream. “A plot to soil my name and reputation.” As I am dragged away the teller steps from behind the glass partition: I recognize her now as the first lover I had ever had. I hadn’t thought about her in years, though I remember we parted bitterly. She produces a packet of letters in my hand proclaiming my undying affection. “Are these forgeries too?” she shouts, fanning the letters in my face. A judge in black robes steps out of the manager’s office. The powdered wig frames a face distinctly feline. His gavel appears gnawed as if by a child’s teeth. I was in deep now. The bill, the letters. Though my intentions were sincere, how could I possibly argue my innocence?  

John had come over to inquire about borrowing my cat to remedy a rat problem he’d been having on the ranch. I assured him I had never owned a cat, though he insisted that on several occasions he had seen the shifty tom lurking about my property. He left, visibly miffed at my reluctance to grant the favor. The next week I saw signs of the cat everywhere: a dead bird on the doormat, claw marks on the radiator, gnawed fish bones taken from the trash. On Saturday I ran into John at the grocers in town and he thanked me enthusiastically for changing my mind about the cat. His problem with rats was over. Had he set me up? Was I a victim of suggestion? I didn’t know, but thereafter every night at bedtime I left a saucer of milk by the kitchen back door. 

My grandmother was a black tomcat. She stalked the house after my grandfather’s trail of crumbs. He was the fat mouse gnawing on a meatball between the couch cushions. I was six, and none of this was impossible. There would be time later for braiding my sleek beard to impress the neighborhood girls sunbathing in the grain fields. I was convinced the Johnson’s cow slept on its back like a table turned upside down. An entire summer passed in the dark of the barn and not a soul came to relieve my vigil. The pail I wore on my head smelled of fish guts and spoiled milk. By fall I’d shot up four inches right out of my everyday overalls. Each night I had to sneak back into the house on tiptoes, so as not to wake grandmother, napping at the back door. 

I am sitting on my aunt’s sofa flipping through an old family album. My aunt sits next to me looking on. There’s a photo of the summer we spent at the shore and another of the time we vacationed at a ranch. But who’s the red-haired boy with freckles wearing my blue bathing suit? And the horse in the photo is actually an enormous rat. Noticing my skepticism, my aunt retreats into the spare bedroom. She comes back a few minutes later with another album. Inside are the same two photos, but this time my mother has the red-haired boy over her knee with her hand raised to spank his bottom and there’s a fat man with his back to the camera straddling the rat-horse. My aunt again heads back to the spare room, and this time I follow her. The walls are fit with shelves lined with thousands of identical albums. My aunt gropes blindly along the spines, but even if she searched for a lifetime she might never stumble on the album with the photos portraying things as they actually were. And now that the events are so confused in my head, I wouldn't recognize them if she did. 

Carved on the trunks of every tree in the forest was a heart pierced through with an arrow. Inside the heart were the initials JJ+MA. The first pair were mine, but I couldn’t recall having ever known an MA. For a time I wandered the forest, admiring the autumn foliage, until I came out upon a small village in a clearing. Every one of the villagers had my face. The only difference was the facial hair: some had thin mustaches, some muttonchop sideburns and goatees, others long beards. Even the women. Maybe one of them could tell me about MA? The trees began to shake and fall, one by one, on the heads of the villagers, pounding them into the ground like tent stakes, just like the cartoons. Only the tips of their heads, like mole hills, stuck out under the trees to mark that they had been. Then the trees fell on the shops and mud huts. When it was finished there was a dismal silence. It was horrible, like standing in the aftermath of a cyclone. Now how would I ever find out the identity of MA? 

They are waiting for me on the 84th floor. I have never been above the 36th, where I have my cubicle. The manual, the one they gave out on the first day, doesn’t say anything about the floors above the 48th. The woman in the cubicle next to mine is lying with her ear cupped to the floor. Is she listening in on something happening on the 35th? The cubicles extend as far as sight in either direction, but I don’t see an elevator or stairwell entrance. I don’t remember using one when I arrived this morning. I don’t remember leaving the night before. One by one they are dimming the lights over the cubicles. I see someone sitting in the chair in front of my desk. She has the head of a donkey and a tail that curls down the back of the chair like an inverted question mark. She is weaving some type of garment out of her long white hair. It looks just about the right fit for someone of my height and build, and she motions toward me, as if she wants me to come over and try it on. But there is no way I’m going near her, though it might be the only way to get upstairs, where after all they are waiting for me. As if I were the last thing left to be waited for in the whole world. 

I entered what I thought was a museum but turned out to be someone’s shoe closet. Thousands of men’s and women’s shoes and sneakers lined racks on the walls, but I was drawn to one particular boot. An ordinary brown military boot, the only one without a mate. I entertained the romantic notion that it could be the one I had lost years earlier, at a wild and rainy music festival in the country; but when I looked down both my shoes were knotted and accounted for. People were filing in behind me and I was pressed deeper into the closet, which seemed to go on forever. They were taking the pairs off the racks, admiring them in their hands, discussing among themselves the virtues of this or that pair, and I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to the boot’s mate. It reminded me of an unpaired beast that had boarded the Ark, just as the waters began to rise and cover the land, and now the world would never know its kind again. 

I get the last seat on the train, next to an old woman with a hen on her lap. “That’s a wonderful specimen,” I say, eyeing the hen like a hungry fox. The old woman just sticks out her tongue like a petulant child. I’m late for a birthday party, but when the train starts moving I realize it’s going in the opposite direction. The ticket taker scolds me, as if to reprimand me for getting on the wrong train. He punches my ticket, then reaches across the seat and grabs the old woman’s tongue, punching it as though it were paper. The hen jumps from her lap, strutting down the aisle and flapping its wings. The train stutters into the next station. That’s my cue, I think, swooping up the hen and heading for the doors, happy to have found the perfect present for my son. 

JUSTIN HOLLIS has an MFA from Hofstra University and currently teaches language and literature at Palm Beach State College.  His work has appeared previously in the Querencia Press Quarterly Anthology, Action, Spectacle, Cholla Needles, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, GAS: Poetry, Art and Music, and The Chiron Review.