Poetry from Sonny Zwierkowski

Daily

 

Scrawled grocery lists

and Friday afternoon traffic jams,

the smell of lumber in a big box hardware store

and sprinkles on sundaes.

Toothpaste splatters on a 6am mirror

and yearly performance reports.
Separate fibers

overlapping,

spinning,

weaving day by day

such a warm tight

swaddle of flames.

February 2014, Denver, CO.

Eleven below

at one o’clock in the afternoon

in Denver,

the lungs are small.
Inhale

and the air forces

its hand down

bronchial tubes.

Cold rushing

expanding squeezing

tormenting mocking

the collective caveman

brain that hyperventilates

siren-like inside.

“You shouldn’t

be here.

You shouldn’t

be here.

You shouldn’t

be here.

You shouldn’t

be here.”
Exhale

all that’s left

and the center cracks

outward like shattering glass,

still

but not whole.
Ghost memories

in escaped vapor.

 

Empty Pools

 

An extended line of empty pools

uncared for,

creeping over with algae,

sitting behind some abandoned

American Dream

White Flight ranch houses,

the overpowering permeation of chlorine

long since faded.
I have sympathy for

the children

in that deprived

neighborhood.
All their parents must

force them

to piss in their own toilet.

 

Reflected

 

I spent last night

half drunk

in my backyard

tossing pebbles into

an open pan of melted snow

reflecting a full

January moon.

When the rocks hit

the water they

rippled the Sea

of Tranquility

and sent wandering

neighborhood coyotes howling.

 

Sense and Order

 

Numbers are just symbols

for something else.

Alone they are meaningless.

Cold, dry

scratches on a page.

Random lines connected

to the universe

by brilliant Arabs,

much like an alphabet

gifted to the Western World

by the Ancient Romans.

Heartless, war-crazed, expansionist

conquerors

that carried with them

a gathering

of lines and angles.

Both sit quiet, senseless, hollow

on a page

until
someone writes the words

and someone else reads them:
In the summer

of 1994,

3 months

after your abortion,

I tried to kiss you again

in your parents’ backyard

but you pulled away

and all I could taste was

the salt

from your tears.