Thomas Zimmerman
Insomniac Sonnet #5
Black coffee and Bob Dylan. Living hard
within your element's not easy. Bend
your mind: you must. The beer and poetry
come later. Sex a vision. Bed an open
boat on open sea. The steady furrows
glisten, pitch. The fins and teeth below.
An island or a continent offstage.
Your little tragicomedy. You almost
die. Get married. Fall in love. Are stalked
by sharks. Not sure about the order. More
a loop perhaps. You thrash and flop, get bit.
Your exit neither left nor right. The folksong
hits the bridge. It's burning. Magic's every—
where, but darkens quickly into night.
Shelter
Baudelaire lies steaming on the bedside table.
Dylan sang hard rain on us from Davenport
to Battle Creek. A storm a guest without
departure date, and shelter just a curtain
caught between the claps. We taste the solubility
of skin in air, of words in silence. Neighbors'
houses melting slowly down the blocks,
like butter lambs in frying pans. Chorizo
and Manchego on the cutting board.
Green grapes, cheap burgundy, the harder stuff
I'll want to hit so soon: all cool as pillows
in long marriages. We've fizzed like salmon
in the river, hugged the driftwood in
the flood, been lost, thought drowned, grown legs, been found.
About Thomas Zimmerman
Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His poems have appeared recently in Rasputin: A Poetry Thread, Little Rose Magazine, and Sum Journal. Tom's website is https://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/.