I Have A Raincoat Which Dreams
of burning. It tells me where
the storms are--
dairy cows
begin to
cower beneath
a tree of ash;
Always in the distance
between me
& a better me
wind waves through shores of dogwood
flowering while the Cascade
Range bursts & opens
the Seattle cloudscape:
With thunder--a pink shiver
of branches beneath lightning--
this rain sheds my coat’s hold
on avoiding the world’s
dissolve & face
in a puddle
asking what I’m going to do
with this life.
Year of Disappearing
My name is signed on the broken
wing of clouds crushed by the sun
setting back into its corner of earth
where the moon searches to find
me crying. I’ve got my longest night.
My motel room. Head filling with snow
looking out on the desert. My friends
are blacking out in dormitories I don’t feel
alive in & I’m walking away. In Hill Country
alone except for Mercury, its cusp on a cactus
flower, retrograde, its needles disappearing
in my palm when I pull it closer to smell
the stamen powdered with what still believes in me.
Worm Translations
Nightcrawler’s stage set
to sand down
the desert
Rain injects itself
almost everywhere
& what am I
among the pumpjacks
of Texas stringing
oil out
if not a steel drum
misplaced by the drill
we’ve named our lord
I hold sacred
what I’ve kept
in denial
of freedom
My catalog copied
every socket & piston
a customer of rust
would eye
All I can remember are the worms
where with their tongues are holy
enough to open the earth
& close it
___________________________
Alexander Zitzner is an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is a former poetry reader for The Adroit Journal, and is the former assistant arts administrator to The Priory writing residency in Eau Claire. His work is forthcoming from Water~Stone Review.
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