Olympus

They ran their fingers across little scars on their knuckles, shared the origin stories of them with each other, picked the dirt out of each other’s fingernails, watched an elderly neighbor walk a dog slowly through the slats in the blinds, laughed at how late it was becoming, breathed heavily onto each other, dug into each other, split the lukewarm glass of water collecting dust on the night stand, went down the hall to the bathroom in lazy shifts, giggled tufts of Sunday musk towards the ceiling, nowhere to be, nothing to care about that wasn’t in arm’s reach, looking down from an Olympus of worn, musty polyester sheets and eight limbs re-rooting and gnawing towards a new center, whispering quiet, simple sentences to each other that nobody else needed to know about.     

Pat Mars, born and raised in Massachusetts but now living and working in the Los Angeles area, is a writer who primarily focuses on the absurdities of the life around him in a dreary industrial suburb. In his short, often prose-style poetry, he attempts to extract and distill moments with a deadpan honesty, or attempt to pull a kernel of humor or sentimentality out of often ugly circumstances