December 2024
RESERVATION
TRACT HOUSE
Larry Blazek
You stop by the tract house where your friend lives. She is glad to see you.
The lawnmower sits by the side of the house where it stopped running. You tinker with it until it runs again. She climbs on it and starts to mow.
You gather some old car parts and rocks that would hurt the mower and set them next to the back of the house.
Her old black Ford also does not run. It sits under the car port in front of the house. You also tinker with that. When you get it to run she speeds off nearly hitting a post of the car port.
She returns with groceries.
She gives you the grand tour of the modest house.
She shows you her trophy case which is a set of pine shelves that contain some faded ribbons and some porcelain knickknacks.
Bio
Larry Blazek lives on a small farm. He tinkers with mechanical devices, plays guitar, and gardens. Somewhere out there is an underground CD of some of his songs. Iron City, Poetry South, Westerly, Channel Magazine, and The Ugly Duckling Press are some of the more recent titles that have accepted his work.
Three Poems
by Steph Sundermann-Zinger
FREEDOM AS SPECTRAL GOLDFISH
True freedom would be life without a body, vague as sky
in a pond’s reflection. In my childhood backyard, goldfish rot
toward spectral emptiness in their spoon-dug divots. A body
will turn spiteful, given time. My father bought the fish for me
and didn’t blame me when they died, even though I’d let the tank
go mossy with neglect. They might have lived full lives, he told me.
After all, you can’t really know a fish’s age. He was younger
that day than I am now, his hair already thinning to bare scalp. Once,
a rangy heron tried to swallow the pumpkin-colored carp
from my sister’s koi pond - she shouted until its beak clacked open
and the fish slid back into the water, indignant flicker. I saw
the scars, long and pale as chopsticks along its scaly sides. He’s
so lucky, I said, and meant it. My father is half water now,
half sky. When I turn, the mirror looks away.
HOSPICE
I once drove a rental car off the road
because it smelled like gardenias. Funny,
the way plant names can sound like diseases -
lungwort, itchweed, deadnettle. You’re
in hospice, which sounds nicer than hospital,
but isn’t. At twilight, my children’s shadows
look like flowers, shaggy blossoms
on long, distorted stalks. Some plants
only bloom at night – moonflower, mock orange,
evening primrose. Even gardenia favors
the close of day, spectral sweetness
bewitching the moths. Shadow can mean
darkness, or a ghost. You might grow
poisonous things, unknowing – sumac, hemlock,
hogweed – the lightest touch leaves a shock
of blisters, weeping. A bouquet can whisper
sorrow’s withered story – clinging vine, bleeding
hearts, forget-me-not. When you go, expected
will make a daisy chain of grief.
AFTER POETRY
Surely, the ants will stagger on,
jaws clamped on purloined pinpricks
of sugar, stitching a ragged seam
along the kitchen baseboards. The fox
will haunt the back hill in velvet slippers,
supple sketch of a mouth
holding the ghosts of a thousand
small deaths, while the barn owl
coughs bones and teeth, and the robins
weave rough cradles in the eaves. The beetles
will bluster and bang, the moths
swarm the porch light, the spiders twist
their silver thread into dewy hammocks,
blistered with flies. Everything will die,
and be born, and die again,
nothing changing but the tender quiet
in the times between, and the sky, that rebel,
still scrawling shadows and light.
​​​​​​BIO
Steph Sundermann-Zinger (they/she) is a queer poet living and writing in the Baltimore area. Her work explores themes of identity, relationship, and connection with the natural world, and has appeared in Blue Unicorn, Little Patuxent Review, Lines + Stars, Literary Mama, The Avenue, and other journals. Their poem, "In Praise of Solitude," was selected as the winner of the 2023 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, and they are a 2024 Writer in Residence for Yellow Arrow Publishing. She holds an MFA from the University of Baltimore.