by Robert Thomas

She unknots the gold laces
of her stockings while he removes
his gloves of gray chamois … flashes of her white
shirt peer through the slash
of her bodice as she bends her neck
to remove the frenello of pearls
from her hair … he doffs the felt
berretta from his head as she
undoes her velvet belt and the jeweled rosary
that hangs from it … he removes his linen
tunic and his doublet of blue satin
as she slips off her Florentine garters …
the scalloped hem of her skirt
brimming with ermines brushes the floor,
the only sound to be heard
in the studio … they detach their silk
sleeves, let them fall to the floor
along with the garland of marigolds from her brow …
she undoes the silver buttons
of his shirt, he tugs out the coral silk
scarf next to her skin, tucked
into the neckline of her chemise …
then she drizzles hot mead
on a bare, white canvas …

Robert Thomas is the author of Dragging the Lake, published by Carnegie Mellon, and Door to Door, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Poets Out Loud Prize and published by Fordham University. He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.

*Photo courtesy of Saucy Salad.

by Ethel Rackin

Lamp, you are an enchanting one
A hideous one besides
Your tortoiseshell exterior shines
Against the stark reason of morning
And complements even the silkiest afternoons
Causing one to comment, how precious
And another to explain, I can hardly bear it
Or I wish it were mine
The gemstones encrusted on your shade
Supposedly found in catacombs
Are the kind given to mothers
When I leave, you are still on

Ethel Rackin‘s first collection, The Forever Notes, is forthcoming in Parlor Press’ Free Verse Editions series in the fall of 2012. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Court Green, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Bard College and PhD in English Literature from Princeton University and is currently Assistant Professor of Language and Literature at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania.

*Photo courtesy of Dalton Rowe.

by Amy Lawless

A suicide was performed by a man who
lives in this building by the name of Willie Mays.
And he’d never heard of the real Willie Mays.
So he threw trash at people who called him
The Say Hey Kid.
When we were piled into the car
you pointed and said
“That’s where Willie Mays the mental patient lived,”
and I wondered what if he really was The Say Hey Kid.
And we, the collective, were wrong
to bother an old man in retirement
just trying to sort his trash
as if he were anyone else.

Amy Lawless is the author of Noctis Licentia (Black Maze Books 2008), a four poem pamphlet from Greying Ghost Press, and the forthcoming chapbook Elephants in Mourning ([sic] Detroit). She was awarded a 2011 fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is from Boston but lives in Brooklyn.

*Photo courtesy of bondidwhat.

by Hilary Sideris

Paul

A man at thirteen, he led
his lamb to temple for

slaughter, knew Hebrew
songs, the taste & sting

of desert sand. He spoke
Aramaic, wrote in Greek

through a glass darkly,
turn the other cheek,

without which what’s
a beggar between thieves,

nailed to another crucifix?
He saw Steven dragged

from the Sanhedrin,
but cast no stone.

Christopher

Saint of thoroughfares
& teamsters, available

wherever goods & souls
need to be hauled—

lugged overland, galley
slave-rowed—once a thug

called Reprobus, he mowed
the Devil down with his

backhand, his brandished
cross. The Christ child

put on serious pounds,
mid-river in his arms.

John of the Cross

His jailers claimed
divine light filled

his cell the night
he slipped away—

a rope of tied-together
sheets, a padlock

picked by Mary,
the radiant lady who

held out her hand
when in dark

toddlerhood he fell
into his uncle’s pond.

Hilary Sideris is the author of The Orange Juice Is Over (Finishing Line Press 2008) and Baby (Pudding House Press 2009). Her poems have recently appeared in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Connecticut Review, Confrontation, PMS, Poet Lore, Salamander, Swink, and Tar River Poetry. Her chapbook, Gold & Other Fish is now available from Finishing Line Press. She works as a staff developer in language and literacy programs at The City University of New York.

*Photo courtesy of Art History Images (Holly Hayes).

by Caley O’Dwyer

The main thing was to get on a game show as soon as possible.
You’d be amazed what money can do, “and who,” Marvin added,
as he stepped inside the mouth. The lights weren’t joking, the frivolity
was congealing, and good times were just ahead, getting tan.
The cost depended on the cast, the cast depended on who was doing
the director, and it was best to just get on with things. Haul ass!

Carla didn’t want to go inside the abandoned bikini factory.
“We’ll be late for ‘Kitchen Nightmares,’” she said, and then
said again since no one is listening. I, or the person nearest,
tugged her arm as we all looked forward, fidgeting, out of frame,
where the rain hadn’t touched in years but where the years
had been falling in a heavy cadence that was now pooling.

“I can’t see a thing,” said the new girl, and no surprise
she was the big winner. Money comes to us like dreams do to Indians,
mysterious, a thing of ancient worship and dread.
Lost ancestors, we cry, help us get ahead, but it is the mind
that’s missing. The timer is racing. Its digits are goodbyes.
Inside us, flashing, is a neon sign that says, “Applause!”

An associate professor of writing at the University of Southern California, Caley O’Dwyer’s poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Washington Square, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals, as well as in The Dallas Morning News and The Tate Modern Museum in London. He is a winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, a recipient of a Helene Wurlitzer grant for poetry, and a winner of the “Images” contest, judged by Yusef Komunyakaa. His first book of poems, Full Nova, is available on Orchises Press.

*Photo courtesy of Pete Prodoehl.

by Joseph Mailander

for Trina Duke

I do not belong to any tribe,
not even my own; I do not belong
to the mid-Atlantic, where they fashion
dignity into a straight-jacket; I do not belong
to the war, or to the party, or to the streets,
and I am not a Croatian, and I am not
a Christian, and I am not yours.

I am becoming a California—
Within is a Hollywood & Vine,
a Haight Ashbury, a Eureka redwood,
all pulsing inside me, like good vibrations
in a Sunset studio, where they are strumming
Joni Mitchell to red-tag girls
who slipped out of a clinic unobserved,
sipping Schramsberg, eying their latest.

I have a Big Sur, a Kerouac
on speed-dial, a dharma on PCH,
a City Lights and a dry martini.
I know where my mind goes:
it goes everywhere, but always sleeps
on a hill where a coast live oak
casts a shadow like a perfumed palace.

Old man crazy pours Junipero gin,
his bartenders can’t make up their minds,
whether I am on this side or not.
Pour me a cup of roadside wine
from every rocky and plaintive county,
drink to the star of a sleepy night,
my valleys are smoking with sacred fires.

To live and labor in California
where there is far too much to love,
far too much to crave, to brave,
far too much joy for academic gain—
I have mine, the finest madness of the female,
gauging the alluvial Sierra fan,
inhaling the sagebrush by the crushed granite path,
and pledging to a glacier: “I am becoming
a California, as sand becomes an Egypt over time.”

Joseph Mailander is a writer in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Plasma of Terror, a novel, and a forthcoming collection of poems entitled Minor Arcana: Tarot Poems and Other Poems.

*Photo courtesy of MiguelVieira.

by Amy Holman

It is how I still
            —this delirium river
a fever of openings, lotus the size
of tea kettles—
See them? Two women floating through
                        a category of nature?
                                                It’s how I still see them,
the way they disagree in all the chores
they do together—pick the lotus,
            hook the lace—in a vessel flabbergasted by
                        beheaded blossoms,
            adrift among the living, hovering tattle tails.
One had the bounty, one had the courage,
one took cover, one left it.
The boat held the refuse.
                                    Nothing they shared was shared:
                        their hearts refused it.

Amy Holman remarks on discoveries, society, and the news through her poetry and literary essays. Her books include Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window and Wait For Me, I’m Gone. She blogs at her http://lendingwhale.com/ and the group-edited http://wewhoareabouttodie.com/.

*Photo courtesy of Roland & Sonja.

Poetry has been a key element in Zócalo’s eclectic blend since we first began publishing in 2008. We were delighted to find ourselves building a literary space for both established and emerging poets. And we appreciated it when Los Angeles poet Lynne Thompson wrote us to say, “The diverse voices Zócalo publishes coupled with gorgeous visual art make it a joyous read.”

Before long, though, we wanted to do more to spotlight the most beautiful and difficult of literary arts. So we launched Zócalo’s first annual poetry prize. It was—and is—intended to complement the Zócalo Book Prize, which honors the author whose nonfiction work most effectively deepens our understanding of community—of how people connect to people. The Zócalo Poetry Prize awards $1,000 to the U.S. poet whose original poem best explores people’s connection to place. We received entries from over 700 poets from all across the country. Their poems explore where we come from, what it means to love, or leave, a place, and how a particular geography can define us.

As National Poetry Month begins, we’re pleased to announce that the first Zócalo Poetry Prize goes to Jody Zorgdrager for “Coming Back, It Comes Back,” a poem about returning to Massachusetts. Zócalo poetry editor Stephanie Brown called it “fond, flinty, yet unsentimental.” Zorgdrager evokes a place that “surprises, dismays, and delights. Her Massachusetts is high and low, saltbox houses and ice cream toppings, Puritan sermons and deer ticks.” It is, for better or worse, home. Brown was reminded of another New England poet’s definition of that very same place: as Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Coming Back, It Comes Back

that the landscape seems tighter, like a staircase
in a house built circa 1715. How this shapes
the way you walk. The way you inhale
only so deeply. Humidity dripping
from the morning’s stiff upper lip
is perfect for vacuuming, the nap in carpet
rising squarely as kernels of butter-and-sugar
corn on the cob. Itch of mosquito bite.
Deer tick. Panty hose. Courtesies of full service
gas stations and ice cream stand attendants
offering jimmies, their accents a cross between
toddler and mafia. Drivers who mow you down
with horns for passivity in rotaries. Listeners
interrupting mid-sentence to show interest
in getting to the point. No saying one thing
(pop) and meaning another (soda). Bottles
are returned for a nickel to a machine
that crushes as it redeems. The Puritan sermons
of thunder and lightning. Weathered is a color
of shingles on Saltboxes and Capes on the Cape.
Why charter a boat when down the road
Melville wrote the book on whale watching,
Bishop was born to reel in rainbows, and
Emily modeled the secret of staying put
is all in how you look at the world. Knowing
what you’re made of but seeing no need to frame it
with paper seat covers in every stall on the Pike.
The smell of ocean lingering on a towel hung out
to dry. The mingling here of the we and my I.

We spoke to Zorgdrager about the poem and the poet behind it.

Q. What inspired you to write “Coming Back, It Comes Back”?

A. I’m originally from New England. I grew up here. And then I moved various places, and most recently spent 12 years in the Pacific Northwest. Until I returned to Massachusetts, though, I didn’t realize all of the things I’d missed. And so I wrote the poem upon returning.

Q. When do you feel a poem works? When does the fear subside?

A. I’m not sure the fear ever subsides. In fact, when I won the prize, I thought, “Oh no!” because I thought I might have revised it since. So I’m not sure a poem is ever finished. But, ultimately, apart from a little polishing here and there, I did feel that this poem was finished.

Q. How do you make a living?

A. In any legal way I can. I’m not one of the people who teach. I found out early on that I can’t be the kind of teacher I want to be and the kind of writer I want to be at the same time. So I’ve done everything from being an addiction coach—helping people quit smoking—to doing temp work. Recently, I’ve been the executive director of Friends of Worcester’s Senior Center. It’s tough to support my art and pay my bills.

Q. What are your work habits?

A. I will walk out my poem five or six times in my head, which you can do with a poem because it’s shorter than a novel, and I will get the poem going in my head. Then, late at night for two or three hours I will commit it to the page. There’s something about the rhythm of walking, and again that’s where place enters into it.

Q. Where do you go to get satisfying connection to people or place?

A. I go to the library, and not so much for the people as for the books. And I know it sounds strange to say that the library is my community, but as a writer that is what I get a lot of my identity from and what shapes me. So in a sense the bookshelves of the library are my community. But with this poem, a surprise came at the end, when I got to the line, “The mingling here of the we and my I.” To me, that’s what community is. It’s that place where you know you’re part of that “We,” and that “We” is part of you.

*Photo courtesy of rockonmu.

by D. Nurkse

Two sleepers in the pine cabin, both us,
horizon in the window like a spirit level,
Ferris Island with its single lamp, August,
annoying whoosh of the gold flies, suddenly imperceptible,
a lull covering us like a nubby cotton blanket.

Perhaps it was then I lost the skinny thread
that fastens the needles to their sticky cones,
the insouciant cloud to its ponderous shadow.
The coast was framed on her lips, but it was dusk.
I couldn’t grasp how her breath held it, almost spoken.

I will never know who I am, never have a clear mind,
but moonrise will come, and the stumbling moth,
whiter in darkness, groping for the outlines of a face.

D. Nurkse is the author of 10 books of poetry, including The Fall, Burnt Island, The Border Kingdom, and the forthcoming A Night In Brooklyn, all from Knopf. He received a 2009 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

*Photo courtesy of AstridWestvang.

by Henry Israeli

When I bend down to smell them
I get an eerie feeling that you’ve done this before
and it came to a sorry end.
What drives me to lower my bucket into the well
of self-torture over and over,
like the bird that keeps flying into the window
above my desk? He smacks himself silly, darts off,
and does the same thing the next day. I assume it’s a he
because no female could be so stupid.
Stop for a second, bird, and think about
what idiot god designed you for such an absurd,
redundant purpose? What kind of an asshole
would garner pleasure from your suffering?
Can’t you do something else compulsively,
something more self-serving? Like building nests
for all the lazy birds? But look at me.
I’m talking to a bird. I’m asking it questions
over and over as if it might look down from my window
and tweet, “This is what I do. What do you do?
What do you do, you boob?” He’d have a point.
We all have to fashion a purpose
out of the mundane things that occupy our
attention. I, for instance, am a knife picker.
I like the sharp ones with the ivory handles best.
I arrange them in a tall clear vase
with just enough water to keep them fresh.
They smell so good I just have to
bend down and take a deep whiff,
even if it means losing face.

Henry Israeli’s books include New Messiahs (Four Way Books, 2002) and Praying to the Black Cat (Del Sol, 2010) and, in translation, Fresco: the Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku (New Directions, 2002), Child of Nature (New Directions, 2010), and Haywire: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2011). He is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books.

*Photo courtesy of anguskirk.