By Bill Hollands
Featured Image: “Untitled” by Sherry Pollack Walker

Your kooky upstairs neighbor best bud
bolts to the Big Apple and hails a cab
in her wedding dress, then your neurotic
Swedish landlady frenemy’s invisible
husband kicks the bucket and San Fran
beckons. Your gruff but lovable
amusingly alcoholic father-figure boss
forgets he’s comic relief and finds himself
in an earnest weekly one-hour drama
while your beloved bald work husband
morphs into a genial cruise ship captain
and takes to the high seas. Like losing
a limb, each one. A child. It’s time
for a change: you ditch the studio
apartment with the foldout sofa bed
for a snazzy one-bedroom in a high-rise
downtown. You throw one of your famous
dinner parties and wait for the hilarious
disaster but the replacement sidekicks
never quite click and the ratings
continue to slide. When the guests depart
(Goodbye! Goodbye!) you find the perfect
spot on the wall for that decorative
yet symbolic first letter of your name.
You measure, you hammer, you hang,
but it’s always just a little bit off.
No one can tell but you.

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Bill Hollands is the author of Mangrove (ELJ Editions, 2025). His poetry has been featured on The Slowdown podcast and in such journals as The Southern Review, DIAGRAM, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, The Greensboro Review, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, Rattle, and Plume. He is a 2025 Jack Straw Writing Fellow and lives with his husband and their son in Seattle.