Lisa Zimmerman’s poems and short stories have appeared in Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Florida Review, and many other magazines. Her poetry collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Tallahassee, FL: Anhinga Press, 2008) and The Hours I Keep (Mint Hill, NC: Main Street Rag, 2016). She teaches at the University of Northern Colorado and lives in Fort Collins beside a small lake.

Poems

Distracted by Science

I spend too much time in the garden
studying the overflowing compost bin
with its unraveled orange rinds, furry
burned bagels, sour oatmeal, plush gray
mice darting in and out of slimy noodles,
blackened fragments of cabbage, slowly
decomposing wheat bread and I remember
how the discovery of penicillin began
with mold in a Petri dish.

When I finally return to the kitchen
the boiling rice has scorched the pot, proving
a scientific fact about time and water
evaporating first into steam
and then into nothing.

First published in Four Ties Lit Review (2014).

Small Winged Ode

I was going to praise the great rise
of peaks above the bustling town,
their ripped sleeves of snow, the gleam
of the silver green river below

but then the young poet beside me
whispered You have a ladybug
in your hair and the tiny creature
walked from her finger onto mine.

Nothing to do then but open one door,
then another, carry her in my cupped hand
into the yellow air of afternoon

and set her down on a striped leaf
on a bush below those grand
and spectacular mountains.

First published in The Hours I Keep (Mint Hill, NC: Main Street Rag, 2016).

Against Winter

I want to memorize the poem about the knot
even though it ends in winter
not because it ends in death
or how the “she” in the poem was ready.
I want winter to end because
acres of cold air bit the grass down
to dry gold and worthless just the same.

I can’t get beyond the sleepless dark
windows with their ache of ice along the borders,
quarrel of juncos in the birdfeeder,
summer hammock in a shred
of red and yellow cotton.

I am ready to let this January curtain close,
let the whole room get quiet, little candle
in the corner dying out, then open
to a farmer burning spring weeds
in the ditch, fire singing the insects awake,
the sun a bright knot crackling over the planted field.

First published in The Hours I Keep (Mint Hill, NC: Main Street Rag, 2016).

Perhaps the Truth Depends

on a walk around a lake, said Stevens.
Perhaps my dog trotting ahead of me

on the path around the lake will find it
first. He’s got the whole world

in his nostrils. I think he’s on a mission
for the truth but then we’re both distracted

by a turtle’s splash in the green water
inside towering stalks of cattails

and the redwing blackbird’s notes sliding
down the ladder of its throat.

Perhaps the truth purrs in the engine
of a small plane overhead or the soft

silver ears of mullein leaves that stop me
around the curve. Maybe it depends

on focus—blue needle of a dragonfly
above black-eyed Susans,

the rustling whip of a garter snake
through waves of orchard grass

or perhaps in the way a blue heron
stills above the shadowy water,

the gleaming fish of his desire
just below the surface.

This poem is included in The Hours I Keep (Mint Hill, NC: Main Street Rag, 2016).

How the Garden Looks from Here

The cat finds her way among herbs
while bees follow each other into an audience

of blossoms. Already a door on the house
has opened into sunlight and a woman

sits at a wheel and shapes a bowl
from a flake of earth. The dog yawns

beside her, waiting. No one notices
the horses moving, slow as stars,

across the dry grass
of sky.

First published in How the Garden Looks from Here (Valdosta, GA: Snake Nation Press, 2004).

The Wind, the Lake, the Deer

What is wind? the way it spends itself
against the house, sleeps briefly
like a child in fever, then wakes afraid
and unintelligible, when it wants to be
more than a barren woman raking
the lake into fits of momentary white.

I dreamt of scarves in turquoise and fuchsia
that said here, here is joy in focus,
and wakened later to you
coming inside from the morning's blue chill
to say that deer ate the red tulips
in the dark while we slept.                       

First published in How the Garden Looks from Here (Valdosta, GA: Snake Nation Press, 2004).

Not about Birds

My younger daughter’s first tattoo
is a window, two birds inside one inked square.
Hard to tell if they fly into or out of her body.

            *

I know a woman who chronicles her grief
in poem after poem as her body dissolves into smallest
windows of lace the doctors can’t see through.

                                    *

In a town in Wyoming my son looks through the window
of a newspaper box labeled “Free Poems” and chooses one at random
and reads it to me over the phone. Light and time balance

the brief hour of a solstice sun and when I watch a small fish
break the murky window of the lake behind the house
for a moment I am not sad about anything.

First published in Apple Valley Review (2016).

Reappearances

After a painting by Gayle Crites

Why the bruised dress? Why the lonely sleepwalk?
That is not blood you move through,
not the scorched aftermath of sunset
in the immediate distance. You breathe
an ochre landscape. Your sisters
carry their burdens with purpose

so they are not burdens. Their arms
swing free. They are beside you,
above you, behind and before you.
The black ash of men
does not burn them.

Elsewhere women feed babies, warbling
small songs to drive sickness
and sadness away. Everything begins
as entrance.

Your hands are empty.
Keep walking. Keep singing.

First published in Sonic Boom (2018).

Avalon and the Dinosaurs

For days she wore only the aqua sweatshirt
spaghetti stained with grimy cuffs,
the brontosaurus beaming out at us from her chest
the words EXTINCT IS FOREVER, which she cannot read,
floating below his happy face.
He is her friend
she wears him like an emblem
through the lacquered afternoon
stomping through the house, her private rain forest.
And we know as we watch her
that she expects to spot him at any time
around some corner, in the garden, or at least at the zoo
where surely all creatures are saved and celebrated.
How she would pat and embrace him
her hand a white leaf against his skin.
She would feed him bits of bread, rice, sliced banana, anything
to see him tremble with joy
down the length of his great uncomplicated body.

Then one morning she approached us
just risen from sleep and said All the dinosaurs died
with a grief so deep and pure we could only
nod and apologize and regret—
she learned so soon that what we love
moves on sometimes across the dreamy landscape
long before we ever hold it in our arms.

First published in How the Garden Looks from Here (Valdosta, GA: Snake Nation Press, 2004).

Oklahoma, 1885

Her brown hand shades her eyes
but there is only the meadowlark, out of nowhere,
all the other women so far away
their voices are nothing to this wind
beating the one tree down into prayer.

Sod house and no way to keep the centipedes
and small snakes from the walls so she stands
out on what would be a front stoop
while day travels toward her as heat
rising over the barren field.

On this terrain the rivers are only rumor,
the gullies beneath full of wasted hope
creased and rippled as an unmade bed.
Tips of yellow grass lead to her house
the door a mouth gaping.
Hot wind blows the clouds north
and all the while kicks the milk pail dry.
I was so lonely I carried a beetle in my apron pocket
all day, to and fro to and fro.

First published in How the Garden Looks from Here (Valdosta, GA: Snake Nation Press, 2004).

All poems are Copyright 2018