This issue features
interview with Jonathon Benjamin,
photo by Manit Larpluechai,
poetry by Richard Atwood,
poetry by Marcus Bullock,
poetry by Ananya Chaterjee,
poetry by Paula Goldman,
poetry by Ann Yu Huang,
poetry by Lary Kleeman,
photo by Renata Kuthanova,
poetry by Paul Martin,
poetry by Maura Way,
poetry by Diana Woodcock,
photo by Valeriy Kachaev, and
poetry by James K. Zimmerman.
Buddha
© by Manit Larpluechai.
Jonathon Benjamin
An Interview with Jonathon "Jack-Jack" Benjamin and Robert L. Giron
RLG = Robert L. Giron
JB = Jonathon Benjamin RLG
Thank you, Jonathan, for agreeing to be interviewed about your book American Airman. We are especially interested in the book as I believe you are or have been an Arlington, VA resident. I’d like to start by asking, is your book a memoir or fictional? Can you give us some brief background information for our readers?
JB
This book is a memoir, and it has a varied and interesting background. I grew up on Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Washington when it was still only Fort Lewis. I joined the US Air Force as an Avionics Technician in 2010, not long after my academic scholarship to college ran out. I served for a few years in Texas before getting stationed in England in 2013. It was there that I sustained a near fatal traumatic injury. I spent two years in the hospital before I was notified that I’d be retired from the Air Force. So, knowing this, I decided that I would return to university education and finish my four-year degree. The same year I left the hospital I was enrolling in college. It was at the George Washington University that I found the art of playwriting and the first iteration of American Airman came about. The play was produced by the John F Kennedy Center in Pittsburgh, PA. I turned the play into a book in 2021 and now am a published author of my debut memoir, American Airman, a Memoir of a Wounded Veteran.
RLG
How do you account for your father’s attitude towards you in the early part of the book?
JB
I have to associate the male biological’s attitude to his childhood as a Vietnam Veteran’s son and the abrasive, toxic reality of what it meant to be a man in the US Army. Thinking more on it at this time, being African American men, his attitude towards me might have been a “paternal” instinct to get me prepared for the reality of being Black in America.
RLG
Just out of curiosity, are you an only child?
JB
I am the eldest of three boys. I know that nothing that happened was their fault and I also know they didn’t do anything wrong, but, leaving them out, it allowed for me to focus on what I could remember and what actually happened. I felt that including my siblings would cloud the narrative and create a superfluous subplot that I could not remember as well, given my gap in memory of my siblings during my recovery.
RLG
That’s makes perfect sense. As a writer and editor, myself, I think you chose well by doing that as trying to say too much can distract the thread of a novel/memoir.
In the book you talk about the difficulties you had with your parents. Do you mind explaining why this was so?
JB
It is hard and still very much unfathomably perplexing why the biologicals behaved the way they did during my recovery. I do know that they, at one point, were there to care for me, but, not long after, their focus turned to getting the financial benefits afforded by “caring” for a recovering veteran.
RLG
Sorry to hear that but family dynamics are often very complicated and there is never a perfect pattern for any of us.
You also mention that you had to acquire different housing during high school or college. What kind of advice do you have for others in high school and or in college as they try to balance school and work?
JB
Whatever your focus, make it a priority. Do not let outside influences determine what or where you are going in life. Do your best at what you love and make it a priority how you’re getting there (school, work, etc.).
RLG
While still in high school, you were truly fortunate to have such a good friend and later an aunt who helped you. What lesson of life and family did you learn?
JB
The biggest lessons I learned are that there is always someone willing to help and that blood relation means nothing if not substantiated by the actual care, respect and actions that go along with it. I try not to allow my experience with the biologicals to affect my bigger perspective on humanity, but c’est la vie (such is life).
RLG
Your aunt’s discovery of your sexual orientation created the impetus that led to your joining the Air Force. Do you think you would have joined the Air Force if laws towards the LGBTQ communities had been different during the time you were growing up?
JB
I think that it was, indeed, the impetus for my joining the military, but I also believe that I would have joined eventually anyway. The military was and continues to be a cornerstone in my life. Had I stayed in the closet, I’d have still run out my scholarship and would have had to figure out a new path in life.
RLG
While in the Air Force, what difficulties did you encounter and overcome?
JB
I had to overcome many things in the military that I could not cover in the book. From racism and homophobia to alcoholism and drug abuse. One of the proudest memories I have was a Technical Sergeant approaching me after I had my orders to leave Texas and go to England. He pulled me aside and we had a heart-to-heart talk about my being the first gay and the first Black man he’d ever worked with and how I’d given him an alternate perspective of gay men and their performance as military members and even as American men.
RLG
Now I’d like to focus a bit on your book. How did it start? What was the impetus for the book?
JB
The book started as a play that, as I mentioned, was produced in 2018 by the Kennedy Center in the American College Theatre Festival. The story, as a play, focuses more on the sobering statistics of veteran suicide in America. It wasn’t for another three years that I decided, during a workshop with the DC public Library’s Aspiring Writer’s group that I could make a book of prose about the narrative that is more powerful and all-encompassing than the play could be.
While working with the Air Force’s Wounded Warrior Program (AFW2)—not to be confused with the Wounded Warrior Project (WWP)—I had firsthand experience with veteran suicide when one of our teammates saw no other way out and took his life. The impetus for the book is to speak for the millions of wounded veterans who may not have had a story like my own, who may not have had the breaks I did. I did it for them.
RLG
What difficulties did you encounter and what made it possible to publish the book? Please explain.
JB
Emotion. I try my best to keep a lid on my emotions and writing the book helped to unhinge a flurry of feelings and anxieties that I, at times, found overwhelming and distracting. Remembering the impetus behind the book and the compassion with which I was writing it helped to get me through those moments. The publishing process in America is a convoluted storm of repetitious rejection and deafening disquietude.
RLG
You hit the nail on the head. As a writer and a publisher, I can tell you that there are so many other factors that come into play when a publisher takes on a book that have nothing to do with a manuscript, in general, that someone is wanting to get published. And yes, as a writer, I know what getting rejections for my work also feels like. It is often like having the right arrow to aim at the right target (in this case the press) to get a hit. I’m so glad you carried on and did not give up.
What advice do you have other writers in general as well as those of the LGBTQ communities?
JB
Remember your priorities; make it something greater than yourself. You aren’t meant for complacency or regret; you are a writer and that means something to someone in this world.
RLG
Lastly, are there any individuals or groups that helped you attain your goal to join the Air Force and eventually write your book?
JB
I have to say the Judy and David Price of Arlington, VA helped me to write, edit, proof, read and reread the book. I couldn’t have managed any of this without them. The Aspiring Writer’s group at the DC Public Library is and continues to be a source through which I express and communicate my artistic spirit.
RLG
Thank you for your service and for taking the time to share your story and I wish you all the best.
About the Author
Jonathon Benjamin is a native of the Pacific Northwest. Having grown up on Fort Lewis, in Tacoma, Washington he was raised by the US Army. In 2008 he graduated high school and received an academic scholarship to a local community college in Maryland where his father moved after separating from the military. After starting college education, he decided to join the US Air Force where he was seriously injured overseas in England. After two years in hospital care in three countries, he decided to finish his four-year degree and graduated in three years, magma cum laude, from the George Washington University. He started out as a promising DMV playwright, but tried his hand in prose in 2021, producing his debut memoir, American Airman: A Memoir of a Wounded Veteran. Recently back in the Pacific Northwest, he still writes for the stage and is anticipating working on a second book. His book is the winner of the Macy Award for best memoir 2022, the book is available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/American-Airman-memoir-wounded-veteran-ebook/dp/B0B3V2796L/ref=mp_s_a_1_7?crid=19AU71T4UD06F&keywords=american+airman&qid=1655313209&sprefix=American+Airm%2Caps%2C208&sr=8-7) and at Politics & Prose (https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781624293962).
Richard Atwood
a love poem
a love poem
to be a love poem
must be superb,
be still…
must stand
as clearly as the glass
in a window…
as sure as the rain,
as quiet as the chill
—must do
in little time
what only centuries may
spare…
inebriate as wine,
certain as a hair.
Previously published in Riverrun, Spring 1991.
Copyright © 1991, 2022 by Richard Atwood.
Somewhere in Between
I cannot seem to find a place
for my poems. The magazine
(s) are full of the stuff
most can’t understand. But the language
is so beautiful—
painted words full of starlings
and moon craters: I have
difficulty with the rain
against the bare barns
under tin roofs and
no one
inside—
the cows gone and the harvest
sent to the silos.
I guess I will have to pretend
I was Archibald, not Rod
McKuen, who’s sold more books
than all the poetry
ever written, only as Mac-
Leish still couldn’t even pay
for a dinner at McDonald’s
or Taco Bell
… what I’ve written.
Copyright © 2022 by Richard Atwood.
About the Author
Richard Atwood lives in Wichita, Kansas. He has published three books of poetry and has been work in several literary journals. He has also authored three screenplays, two large stage plays, and an m/m erotic-romantic fantasy with a GPT ambiance (Chronicles of the Mighty and the Fallen, under Richard McHenry. He is retired from the healthcare field and has two more poetry mss in progress.
Marcus Bullock
Buddha on the Road
One day when there is nothing left but dust
Sunsets seen by no one will be
Splendid with colors that have no name.
We still possess the Earth, but contemplate the moon,
Where there are no islands in the stony Sea of Rains.
Recall the Sermon of the Flower at each day’s end.
Yet those who take refuge on an island
Within the reef of Dharma,
Still succumb to the sea of grief.
We still see the Buddha on the road.
His feet still strive as bright as the morning lotus,
But these pictures drift.
He raises his right hand, knowing we see what is to come.
There is no need to kill me, he says,
Merely close your eyes.
Light travels slowly, year in year out,
Across this enormous cup of space.
Our moon-sadness seeps slowly
Through cracks in the roof of night.
Copyright © 2022 Marcus Bullock.
Rainfall
The rain seems to be murmuring in the blackness of a curse.
This is a conspiracy of rusted
Gutters and downspouts that crack and spill.
Tentacles, ink-dark, that descend the wall.
In streets without compassion
A Buddha stoops to free a coin
Bitten tight in a jagged concrete crack.
We are homeless among these crossroads in a time of plague.
I don’t know one word in the language that the
Stones of this city speak.
The lights glow in a color I can’t name.
And yet Shakyamuni holds the coin now, loosened from those jaws.
The Dao tells us
That water in the end will make a
Softer face in stone.
The police cannot be everywhere. Just wait. They’ll leave.
There will be one last day. And then another.
Soon I will see nothing but flourishing.
The bamboos and cedars rise free like smoke this rain.
Someone will shake an umbrella by my door, and fold it closed.
Like on market day when the last shelter folds away.
You walked this way to show me the palm of my hand is warm as yours.
No one ever dreams an end to dreaming.
Even when we dream, we have been dreaming,
But friendship and kindness wake us like a sonorous bell.
The heaviness of rain bends the branches low, almost breaking
Then everything springs up again, released as we have never seen before.
Copyright © 2022 Marcus Bullock.
Babel
I am laying bricks, one by one.
Raising up a tower, window by window.
My hand is hardened to the sharp edges,
My arm is hardened to the weight.
I butter them with mortar, each one.
Each one I settle in its place,
My gesture like a coronation.
Am I building my refuge,
Or a lighthouse, or a watchtower?
I contemplate each brick as though
It were a crystal ball,
Then set it in its place.
With these squared fragments of the earth,
I am laboring to make a noble circle.
I raise a wall and a window;
We go higher with each day.
There is a tune these bricks sing
As I tap each one soundly to its place.
They fly like swallows as I heave
Each one just like the one before.
The tower of Babel stays closed to me.
I chose not to build a door.
Copyright © 2022 Marcus Bullock.
About the Author
Marcus Bullock embarked long ago on a career as a translator that carried him across interesting borders in language as well as to the United States as an immigrant to this cauldron of English speech. He's now a resident in Madison, known to the people of Wisconsin as harboring refugees in flight from reality.
Ananya Chatterjee
Night
Night crawls into me like a restless spouse.
I cave in to let her quietly slide
into the hollows of my distended flesh
and fill me up with familiar delight…
Darkness was never an adversary.
In her shoulders I've buried my saddest sighs.
In those ears I have whispered the wildest thoughts
and emptied pools of liquid agony.
Through many a storm she's held me tight…
There's a rhythm , a latent promise
in the soft and soundless ebbing of light…
Do you sense those footsteps tread your skin?
Do you feel the wind caress your face…
that silken... jasmine... breath of night?
Copyright © 2022 by Ananya Chatterjee.
No Return
There are places I cannot go back to:
a city where I shred my tanned dead cells
and left gurgling pearls of liquid laughter;
a room half-lived , wardrobes smelling
of unwashed, unworn, lovesick clothes;
a washtub turning brown with time;
a lake where the sun drowned each dusk
and the moon winked on from
behind monuments;
a city to which I lost my heart.
A scar that never quite seems to dry…
Only a train-ride away… and yet
so far, I cannot find my way
back to those winding moonless alleys,
where a pair of eyes had held me first -
sidewalks smelling of an ancient kiss.
Some journeys cannot be repeated.
Some places never to be revisited.
Some distances mustn’t be measured by miles.
Only by hours, only by decades…
A city I lost. A city I loved.
Fossilized forever in the mist of time.
Copyright © 2022 by Ananya Chatterjee.
Aging
Conversations
stowed away
in ashtrays
of yesterday
remind me again
we were friends
long before
we turned lovers
As winter nights
wrap our bodies
into comforters bought
over honeymoon fights,
I feel your eyes
towering above..
the newspaper fence..
warming my uncovered back.
I gather your shriveled
palms in mine.
"Come.. let's talk..
like old times.."
Copyright © 2022 by Ananya Chatterjee.
About the Author
Ananya Chatterjee is a software professional who works for Oracle India Pvt Ltd. A gold-medalist in Computer Science, and a bi-lingual poet, she is the author of the Amazon bestseller, The Poet & His Valentine, a collection of verses. Another Soliloquy, The Blind Man’s Rainbow and Un-building Walls are her other books. She has worked as a translator for the poems by actor and poet Soumitra Chatterjee, published in the book Forms Within. She has translated the works of eminent artist Jogen Chowdhury as well and is currently translating Anuj Dhar and Chandrachur Ghose’s Conundrum-Subhash Bose’s Life After Death. She lives in Kolkata with her husband and two children.
Paula Goldman
All That I Can Leave
My old fur coat
Oriental rugs
Shoes
Artwork
No recipes
For bread
For cakes
For pot roast
No one wants
My open arms, kisses,
Fair heart, smiles bursting
Into laughter. Winter’s nakedness
Leading to Lake Michigan.
A startling moonlight’s
Lengthy ladder
Streaming across the water
To the bedroom.
A different morning world.
Dazzling sunrises.
Wisconsin’s reluctant springs.
A new dawn over
A straight horizon.
Barren twigs and branches.
All alive, waiting
To open, as my heart does for you.
Copyright © 2022 by Paula Goldman.
Münter’s Lament
“I have already told you that I dislike it when
you write ‘Mrs. Münter’ in the address….”
Gabrielle Münter’s letter to Kandinsky.
I couldn’t paint.
I couldn’t draw.
I couldn’t read.
You filled your letters
with details of your life
in Moscow, family, friends,
your new housekeeper.
I wrote about my loneliness.
Sweden was not my home.
I missed my house in Murnau.
We road our bicycles through Europe.
You didn’t like Paris.
I enjoyed meeting Matisse; you didn’t.
You were the first person
to acknowledge my work.
We couldn’t come to terms.
You needed my money.
You taught me how to paint quickly
with a palette knife.
I was in deep water
not knowing how to swim.
You untied the skies.
You taught me.
You married in Russia, never
to see me again.
I was your young sweetheart
without your name.
Copyright © 2022 by Paula Goldman.
About the Author
Paula Goldman's book, The Great Canopy, won the Gival Press Poetry Award, 2005, and a second book Late Love was published by Kelsay Books,2020. Her work has appeared the in Harvard Review, The North American Review, Poet Lore, and several anthologies. She holds an MA degree in Journalism from Marquette University and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Former reporter for The Milwaukee Journal, she served as a docent and lecturer at the Milwaukee Art Museum for 25 years .She lives in Milwaukee, WI with her husband of 56 years having two grown children and three grandchildren.
Ann Yu Huang
Destiny Embraces Many:
The people that harm
you the most
aren’t those you alienate.
Many nodded.
“Destiny is not empathetic.”
Going from one extreme to another:
lurking after a horn
learning flamenco
teaching the dog to fetch
enjoying a fleeting speck of time
imagining a future this beautiful
To undress the dress, unbutton a blouse--
customarily for the beloved.
The body insidiously accompanies
the rhythms of page-turning.
Copyright © 2022 by Ann Yu Huang.
The Dot of Light
On your face
your shadows
feel your eyes close
to adventure
sacred in the late afternoon
and lost in light
what were you doing?
Where will it take us
the dot of light
my deep ocean
our synchronization
ending in
demarcation
Copyright © 2022 by Ann Yu Huang.
About the Author
Ann Huang is a Chinese-born, Mexican-raised and US-based author, poet, visual artist and filmmaker who published four award-winning collections, most recently a Shaft of Light. Her lyric poetry speaks of a dreamy state of being by melting present into its past and future, with surrealistic gestures permeating space and time across multiverses. Ann is also the Traveling Show manager for MarinPoetryCenter, and Visual Arts editor for New Found Journal. Visit her poetry site at www.ANNHuangPoetry.com and her film site at www.SaffronSplash.com.
Lary Kleeman
How and Where the Light Falls
How and where the light falls
fixed for a moment, fixes
a moment in tall grass
plumes, takes the eye to a place,
gives a sense of staying put
so that the whirl stops
whirling, the self gathers itself
in a collective pause, a chance
to notice how shadows
have grown and take the yard
earlier now that the sun
has negotiated a lower angle
to its entrance. What would
it take to depose the daily
dictators of time, no time
and not enough time, to
institute a new code of conduct,
one that praises the lower
angle (of not knowing) where we’re
from (and bound to go)?
Copyright © 2022 by Lary Kleeman.
The Poet
Theatrically speaking,
I was here before you
took your seat.
My aliases, before me.
You see, I deal
in the Hypothetical
Inevitable. It’s a fascist
tendency in which
exuberance is radio-tagged
for study.
Secretly, I succumb to lecture—
fraternity being
squishy-minded, bumbling.
Once you haven’t opened
for this long
it gets harder—
a cold-hearted clausula.
Like wind-driven rain,
there’s an immensity
in the wordless
collusion of the seen
and unseen.
Copyright © 2022 by Lary Kleeman.
About the Author
Lary Kleeman lives in Colorado where he micro-farms gourmet garlic and raises native bees. He is looking for a home for his poetry manuscript, Imbroglio.
Cherry Tree
© Renata Kuthanova.
Paul Martin
The cherry tree
I planted thirty years ago
blossomed once more
into a white cloud
that dispersed, petal by petal,
onto the lawn.
Now it’s thick with sweet cherries the birds
tear and pull at - a cowbird, catbirds, robins,
a thrasher, a loud jay, and the seldom seen oriole,
its orange flame flashing
inside the gleaming leaves.
Scarred, old cherry tree
I almost put to the saw,
the dead space I would have made
now alive with raucous song.
Copyright © 2022 by Paul Martin.
My Grandmother Sifting Ashes
In her babushka and a thin, torn sweater
she’s out in the frozen back yard sifting ashes.
A life spent over steaming wash tubs
and the kitchen stove, she’s hunched over,
searching for a few lumps of unburned coal
she’ll return to the furnace,
a cloud of ashes mingling with her breath,
powdering her clothes, her hands, her face.
Copyright © 2022 by Paul Martin.
About the Author
Paul Martin’s poems have appeared in America, Boulevard, Commonweal, New Letters, Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Review. His first book, Closing Distances was published by The Backwaters Press, 2009, and his second, River Scar, was published in 2019 by Grayson Books. He’s the author of three prize-winning chapbooks: Rooms of the Living (Autumn House Press, 2013), Floating on the Lehigh (Grayson Books, 2015) and Mourning Dove (Comstock Review’s Jessica Bryce Niles Prize, 2017).
Maura Way
Indwelling
Flowers and escapability are all I think about today. Seven lords have leapt and now 'tis circumcision day. One day rival foreskins will pop up all over Europe. The mouths of nuns will taste his name. The glut of purported holy prepuces will be stream lined into the rings of Saturn! All while the poinsettia and I try flourishing down here.
Copyright © 2022 Maura Way.
About the Author
Originally from Washington, DC, Maura Way lives in North Carolina, by way of Boise, Idaho. Her work has previously appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Folio, The Hong Kong Review, Poet Lore, and Red Ogre Review. Her debut collection Another Bungalow (Press 53) was published in 2017. She has been a schoolteacher for over twenty years, most recently at New Garden Friends in Greensboro.
Diana Woodcock
Suggested Companions
To walk the middle path,
keep company with one who’s dying
and one who’s just come into
this world, with one whose pastime
is hunting and one who’s converted
to Tibetan Buddhism—won’t kill
even a flea. Keep company
with caribou on their frozen tundra
and butterflies flittering on invisible air currents,
with raven acrobats performing for free,
and liguus snails trekking up smooth-
barked trails of hammock trees,
with a solitary shepherd of flock and flute,
with goldenrod rustling—rising and bowing
before the breeze—and the stark, silent,
still mountain accepting the weathering
of bacteria and plants,
bent on reducing it to rubble.
Previously published in Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality; Tread Softly, FutureCycle Press.
Copyright © 2018 by Diana Woodcock.
What Once Flourished There
Living in a desert transformed
by oil and natural gas, I reverence
marine animals’ sediment—
buried for a billion years,
energy stored in their bodies’ molecules.
In the teardrop-shaped oil flare,
see what once flourished there:
sea bream and marine mollusks,
jellyfish, colorful clowns, venomous-
spined dragon and stonefish,
sea urchins and sponges—
yellow and pink tube,
moray eels, sharks and sting rays,
reef-building corals—sea firs and fern-
like hydroids, the off-shore soft ones:
sea fans (horny gorgonians)
and whips, black coral—skeletons
polished glossy ebony for prayer beads.
Copyright © 2022 by Diana Woodcock.
Invincible Vision
That a person can lie in a coma
for years, oblivious to her surroundings,
is nothing short of astounding.
But even more so, that a person
can be fully awake and yet see nothing,
hear nothing of Earth’s grandeur.
To be sure, few of us are fully awake.
Someone needs to shake us out
of our complacency. Such a pity
to share this Earth with trees
and never once notice the beauty
of wavering leaves or the feel
of the soft breeze that stirs them.
To live all one’s life in the desert,
never once to hear the dunes singing
or winter rains brimming over wadis,
to never notice how crude oil carries more
than a whiff of hellfire and brimstone.[1]
Pity indeed to be blinded by infernal sands,
fossil fuels, convenience of creature comforts,
islands reclaimed from the placid sea
of turquoise shallows, prosperity
that poses as paradise.
To never sit all day alone
by the Inland Sea or a wadi
waiting for unfettered clouds.
To live a lifetime, eyes of the mind blind
to the stationary blasts of waterfalls.[2]
To taste nothing—neither pomegranate
tea nor salty sea, to fail to inhale fragrance
distilled by flowers at precise hours
for specific species. To never bend low
over the trail of industrious ants to watch
how they go about their business with admirable
stick-to-itiveness. To allow everything
to remain a blur—whirling world swirling by—
no different than the one who lies comatose,
eyes closed tight, ears unable to hear Logos.
To never once ask for the gift of invincible
vision—how can this be?
[1] Christopher Dickey
[2] William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey
Copyright © 2022 by Diana Woodcock.
Women's Voices
Sometimes I listen to
Turkish music, Bahar,
Kordes Turkuler, even though
the tempo’s too fast, too
brash, because I need to feel
at last a little unsettled,
a bit rattled by discordance—
the voices of women from
Turkish, Armenian,
Kurdish borders calling
out to me. Language
mysterious, but no
mistaking their message.
Same in every language:
absence of love and respect
the ultimate atrocity.
Previously published in A Room of Her Own (AROHO’s) anthology WAVES.
Copyright © 2020 Diana Woodcock.
About the Author
Diana Woodcock is the author of seven chapbooks and four poetry collections, most recently Facing Aridity, published in 2021 as a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature (Homebound Publications/Wayfarer Books). Forthcoming in 2023 is Holy Sparks (a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award). Recipient of the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, her work appears in Best New Poets 2008 and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where her research was an inquiry into the role of poetry in the search for an environmental ethic.
Robots
© by Valeriy Kachaev.
James K. Zimmerman
When Robots Came of Age
we loved it when you were cute
and clunky, your genetic footprint
anchored in Erector Sets and Legos
we even learned to sing and whistle
Artoo-Detoo style, feign
C-3PO’s ersatz British accent
or the metallic chatter of WALL-E
we feared you when you seemed
to seek dominion over our world
hated you for building cars
and trucks much faster than our
hapless human hands allow
we understood your desperation
when your faces tore away
revealing whirring clockworks
or computer machinations
beneath your soft synthetic skin
we began to feel for you when first
you learned to smile like us
or sometimes even with us
programmed as you were
to laugh at silly little jokes
and when you showed us tears
of deepest sadness, when
you wept in shameless joy
at weddings, graduations
and Superbowls, we still
were charmed and fascinated
by your likeness to ourselves
it was only when you cried for us
seeing through the limits of our lives
knowing that there comes a time
when no replacement parts, quick
reboots, or apps to override decay
can save us from a system crash
or virus too vicious to repair
only then did our discomfort rise
to see your eyes so limpid
in pity and palpable sorrow
only then did we stop
and abruptly turn away
Previously published in Atlanta Review.
Copyright © James K. Zimmerman.
The Baptismal Rite of Ants
one soldiers across the vast
white expanse, the curved
spacetime of the bathroom sink,
a hesitant line of ten or twelve
in loose formation follow
perhaps in search of oatmeal bits
or popcorn husks that linger there
after a toothbrush or pick departs
for the open drawer below
or perhaps they seek a spot
of toothpaste, the cloying taste
of xylitol, sorbitol, or fluoride
to keep antennae clean
or they are a team in the Ant
Olympics, practicing their giant
slalom between errant human
hairs on the porcelain concavity
but no, I suspect this space is
sacred to them, this place where
the deluge comes, the tsunami
that drives them deep down a watery
well, no ark to carry them through
hell, through the swirling maelstrom
where soap-and-toothpaste-laden
waves wash over mandible and
overwhelming fear, where they cling
to the walls, hold on to grooves
and gouges too small for us to know
or see, until the inundation ends
and they clamber up into the light,
the white world above, renewed,
purified, redeemed
so now they march across this
crucible to test their faith, to wait
at the rim of the cave, the well,
the kiva, for the turbid water
to save their souls as it cascades
from incandescent heavens above
Previously published Chautauqua.
Copyright © 2022 James K. Zimmerman.
My Life in Silage
sometimes I think
I’d like to live
in a missile silo
one that had been
safe shelter
for an Atlas-F
with the power of a
hundred Hiroshimas
walls of cement
and steel three or
four feet thick
doors of two thousand
pounds or more
much more
naturally air-
conditioned and
quiet ten stories
down in the ground
plenty of room
for all my books
toys and dreams
and fantasies of a world
in ruin above me
I could grow my own
hydroponically if I
could find the water
never have to shave
or wear a tux or
winter coat or
anything at all in fact
I could keep my
thoughts in a file
drawer right next to
my toenail clippings
and no one would
ever have to know
I could light my
way with fireflies
if I felt like it
I could sniff and
snore and scratch
in the middle
of the afternoon if
I knew when that was
and I could keep
my perfect world
alive forever as long
as I kept the door
tightly shut
Previously published in Freshwater.
Copyright © 2022 James K. Zimmerman.
About the Author
James K. Zimmerman’s writing appears in Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, Salamander, and elsewhere. He is the author of Little Miracles (Passager, 2015) and Family Cookout (Comstock, 2016), winner of the 2015 Jessie Bryce Niles Prize. He lives near New York City with his wife and his imagination, and can be contacted through his website, https://jameskzimmerman.net.