Brian Dean Bollman across five issues
Brian Dean Bollman is a poet whose work circulated through experimental literary magazines in the 2000s. Five historical issues preserve his name and work, ranging from lyric memory and desire to sound-driven language and spare narrative sequences.
Issue 9 records “3 Poems.” Issue 13 preserves “Sock” and “Afternoon Break” in full. Issue 22 preserves “Calushe.” Issue 28 records “Iven Seen.” Issue 37 preserves “Bobby” and “Cat’s Nest.”
Sock
drive
mother
of Edinburgh
green lover
slouch you slouch
mother green mother
green lie
in wait past fear weather
cold morning in June
brother
June how’s house sitting
pretty mother
young mother where
ceiling meets winter where
blouse meets skin where
house sits green where
your brother lives a
cold morning clear old southern
California suburb mother
sticks to memory like church and you can’t tell
because you don’t know
You just don’t know what your dream is
you drive
you turn the corner
and there are several words
in order that
mean something to you
asleep now
they shift shape and you get up
and you can think of
a blouse with a woman’s skin
in it a blouse that opens
not that you are thinking
of it open
but it could open
it is the open-able aspect of it that compels
a ceiling
and old suburban neighborhood
with its concrete retaining
and low morning sun memories of unwanted church
Afternoon Break
Lying in
my car thinking
of a woman with big
eyes who looked
with skin clear
that smooth ashen
dark hair against
and yet not pale
her lips a fleshy
umber an exaggerated
cupidity fawnish
startled I imagine
kissing her trying
to cipher the experience
large lips around
a small mouth
she seems to suit
further
beneath her shirt
my arms
back
and they seem to
fit
a woman
opens the door
invites me
into a long
corridor leading into
the inner basement of
the library
Calushe
Ah hoosh—
koozh
Ah hoosh
Ah hoosh—
koozh
Ah hoosh
Ah hoosh—
(eech eech eech)
wick
phidh
koozh
Ah hoosh
Ah hoosh—
phidh
Ah hoosh—
phidh
Calushe
Calushe
Ah hoosh
Ah hoosh—
pheez pheez pheez
hah-zhood
Ah hoosh—
koozh
Ah hoosh—
koozh
Ah hoosh—
wick
phidh
Ah hoosh—
Calushe
Calushe
Ah hoosh—
(wai) koozh
Ah (duz yor muhdhoor akt so old?)
Ah hoosh
Ah hoosh—
koozh (eech eech eech)
Ah hoosh—
phidh
phidh
Calushe
Calushe
Ah hoosh
Ah (nook)
Ah (nook)—
koozh (nook nook nook nook)
Ah hoosh—
pheez pheez
phidh
Calushe
Calushe
(and frayool)
Ah hoosh
Ah hoosh—
(be cuz) koozh
Ah hoosh
(the skai) koozh (iz so payool)
Ah hoosh
Ah hoosh—
pheez
phidh
phidh
Bobby
Bobby was abandoned by his mother as a child
Bobby wandered about town playing hide and seek until he found
his father who carried him to bed
Bobby’s father gave him green and grey army men and left him
alone in his room to play for hours
Bobby taught himself to write and draw and thus he passed the years
Bobby thought his testicles were baby birds that he cupped in his
hands
Bobby wondered when they would fledge and fly away
Bobby worked in a planter by a parking lot
The pavement stretched into the distance like a charcoal lake and
the cars shimmered on its surface
Cat’s Nest
Bobby heard mewling when the sprinklers came on
Bobby found a cat’s nest with black newborns wet from birth and
irrigation
Bobby thought the parking lot was their father
Bobby felt sad when they cried in the rain and wished for their
mother to move them away to a dry place
Bobby went to look at them when the sprinklers stopped
Bobby came up silently to the nest and peered in under the Azalea
The mother hunched over her kittens like a charcoal tent licking
the water off their bodies
Other recorded work
Issue 9 preserves the entry “3 Poems,” and Issue 28 preserves the title “Iven Seen.” The individual Issue 9 titles and texts, along with the text of “Iven Seen,” are absent from the surviving pages.
Literary record
AUGHT published Bollman’s poem “A Flora” in 2006. His historical contributor biography records his California background and experimental literary practice. The surviving five-issue sequence presents a poet working across memory, sound, family narrative, desire, and disrupted syntax.