11-10-2025
Hollay Ghadery
REBELLION BOX
Ask your husband about the honey bees. I suspect I may
have an affinity for things that drone and drown
out. On the way here everything was so green it hurt,
the trees practically threw themselves on the road -
and to think, only days ago I’d been worried about
my nose most of all. Now, John’s been hung and the rest
of us sit dumb and cut away at stove wood. No rest
for the foolish. You see, some of us here may
have stepped into battle thinking only about
valour, liberty – winning. It’s easy enough to drown
yourself in these abstracts. It’s a dangerous road
to follow. To think! We remarkable things are hurt
so easily. Tell Mary I think of her often and hurt
when I think of myself like this – all stone and soot. Rest
assured my present circumstance is not finite. Every road
leads home. It’s true, our troops sat in that tavern and may
have felt some degree of foreboding already. We drown
ourselves in glass. I know I was afraid to think about
Mary. Home. Honey bees and my broken nose, about
to fall off my face. Such want of attention. I hurt
the most remarkable people. God, Mary. I will drown
my primitive conditions. I’ll manage to create. I’ll rest
in earth swells, write in indelible ink. I know I may
be the most pressing of hopeless things, because road
after road and I still brandish youth like a shotgun. Road
after road leads to finding something to do about
all this time on my hands. So I dovetail my work. I may
be the most diligent of craftsmen. All this time can hurt,
weigh black and blue in the middle of my face, the rest
—the luxury of a blue cotton dress—the rest can drown,
like marzipan creek pebbles, July’s sweetgrass chew. Drown[1] ,
and wait, because all that talk and rallying - it cleared a road.
I won’t stand for futility. There are so many reasons to rest
your beliefs here, and not one of us has. I write home about
paying debts on time, mending the fence. I write to avoid hurt,
boredom - being forgotten. I write you about the bees. You may
remember the summer we cleared your husband’s land. May
came hard and the bees came early. I was stung twice. It hurt,
but Mary was in blue, and it was something else to think about.
POSTCARD, SANTA MARIA
1.
Across the pool
the boy’s plum-
dark eyes gulp
refracted light
all over the girl
beside me.
Stretched
to indifference
her thighs are
perfectly fattened
calves, flicking
flies; their frisson
of velvet shimmers
made slow
by this
drugged heat.
Made soft.
2.
I’m not that girl
anymore. I
have the
conviction
of dust and
the cervix
of a fifteen-year-old,
my doctor says.
Not bad
for four kids
so I believe
in anything
so I can
believe
at all.
3.
The boy is coming
snake sway
in his hips, a
roving satellite over
breast and
breath, and brown.
His
air-
compressed confidence
warps the children’s
laughter
baffles the sun
so even the girl
looks up.
4.
I’m not that girl
anymore—
her curling toes,
her eyes
impossible beyond
shades, her weight
inside me, shifting
my embarrassment
of cliches
scattered
like nail clippings.
IT WON’T STOP, BUT IT WILL BE DIVIDED INTO FOUR STAGES
Deny it. Then make a link between Count
Dracula, a 15th-century Wallachian voevode
named Vlad and someone
who doesn’t love you back.
Grieve. Then deny it. There’s brutality in
speculation—Dracula hunched over heaving
cleavage. Vlad issuing orders, twenty-thousand
Turkish women, children, and men impaled.
Someone saying,
No, I don’t smoke anymore.
Acknowledge tendency. It’s vicious, it’s closer.
Can’t say for sure Vlad inspired Dracula but he did
flay, cannibalize, and bury people alive. Bodies
scattered over kilometres of vacant land. Brutal,
like someone stepping out onto the street with
someone else,
lighting up.
Accept it. Not all accounts of Vlad portray him as
psychopathic. In parts of Romania, he’s a hero. Others
lump him into the same category as Ivan the Terrible and
Genghis Khan, his tyrannical behaviour more or less
standard for the time. More or less
a better-looking version of yourself.
They’re on the street laughing and it’s more or less
ruthless
but it won’t stop. You will be divided.
-from Rebellion Box, celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Hollay Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her acclaimed memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, was released with Radiant Press in April 2023. Hollay's short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, was released by Gordon Hill Press in 2024. Her chapbook, the leaves of grass are dreaming, was released in November 2025 with Anstruther Press. In February 2026, her debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, will be published by Palimpsest Press. Hollay is a board member of the League of Canadian Poets, the co-chair of the League's BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of the region in which she lives, and a host on The New Books Network. Hollay is also a host of HOWL—the literary arts show—on 89.5 CIUT FM, a member of The Writers Union of Canada, the Creative Nonfiction Collective, and the National Book Critics Circle.
