Three Poems
by Thomas Zimmerman
NOCTURNE (VII)
Your father’s dead but haunts like Hamlet’s dad,
while indecision slips its noose around
your neck: To kill? To die? To live? Forgive
the banshees, incubi and succubi
that gallop through your sleep? The morning’s sticky
sigil on your sheet. Prepubescent
prayer: nothing ever came of it.
Career of evil thwarted too: your fear
of punishment and death. Now
your smile is cracked. The meds you hoard all week
don’t dull your pain. Night’s pentimento bleeds
through every daybreak, darkening your father’s
barnyard: starlit knives and pitchfork, coal-black
billygoat that whispers. Lambs that cry.
MATTERS GRAY AND DARK
The dog and I have just come back from our
slow trot through dappled sun and shade, much like
my better self and I slipstreaming through
this life, lightheaded and beguiled in someone
else’s mind. Now fed and petted, he’s
Anubis, jackal god, canopic jar lid,
comatose in minutes flat. And I
will burn this Sunday, mummified like Ramses
on the leather sofa, dozing through
a horror film. Then evening meds, two black
and bitter beers. So much more there is
to this dark world, to matters gray and dark.
The poet that I’m reading wants to kiss
his great-grandmother’s pubic bone. The dead
crowd around us, telling me they’re me.
STEALING FROM THE DEMON FATHER
The old lord’s head’s a sphere of fire, he sees
the things that you cannot, eternal cosmic
correspondences: the hallucinogenic
dander, opiate-brimmed follicles
in the moon’s silver fur; stalactites
of ichor, flapping eyeless fish in
the cave of a woman’s womb; the star-barbed
snare, the black abyss at the portal of
birth. At least, these are what you dream he sees,
and in your eyes his teeth are a mountain
range encrusted with skulls. His eyebrows are
a stand of snowy pines whispering “Mine.”
He hoards his flowery beauties in the
velvety river valleys, but you’ve stolen
one, their curves ripple in
the cool green stream of their gown. The wind is
music for their words, but your touches burn
them, your caresses blister their skin. You
tell them, show them your love. Smoldering, maimed,
they stay and take the pain. You fear you’ll kill them. Then you’ll
have to steal another. How many fires must
be set to earn your respect?
Thomas Zimmerman (he/him) teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review https://thebigwindowsreview.com/ at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His new poetry collection, My Night to Cook, is forthcoming from Cyberwit.
Website: https:/thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com
Twitter: @bwr_tom
Instagram: tzman2012
COLD SIGNAL 