Remora
What are those little fish called?
The snippets that become
themselves chumming around the floating humpbacked beautiful whales?
In front of me, my wife is standing.
Facing our smeared wet mirror
she combs a brush so gently over her teeth.
I lower my left cheek
into the soft back of her,
clamp my eyes shut.
I can picture them in this head, those fish, as a dream.
They glide suctioning from tooth to fin.
Maybe they suck at aging dead skin,
maybe they skim absent rotting flesh of the last meal
from whale’s slivers of baleen into their tiny silver mouths.
Maybe they are just anchoring themselves
to something soft and beautiful and gently moving
in pillowy sea
when they are feeling small
and so tired
of swimming
alone.
My wife giggles in her sleep.
Lying in bed later I feel her roll her growing pregnant body away from me.
I lower my cheek into the soft back of her.
I want so badly to become small.
Small Feelings Curled and Uncurling Proboscis
In a kaleidoscope of singular places
I’ve bared myself
to the black-veined brown monarch queens
making their way to southern sun.
And it’s always someone else who calls them
on the wind to my attention. Says look
wandering, how spectacular!
And just now, I believe, maybe wings
aren’t always good fortune.
The friend in Missoula today, or Boston, or New York.
Her hands shaped in a heart the last time I saw her.
In El Paso. Or Taos. Or was it Mexico?
With wings, we are now everywhere
and everything is becoming nothing
but so far away.
And look at the orange golden milkweed
under the rainbow crescent
I make with the garden hose
above my gravel driveway,
the triband striped grub, hanging there,
her antennae soon to curl, her snoot nose
to tow mineral water into mouth
and all her soon-to-be. And she will rest, again,
but so far away.
FAMINE
A wave touches the bottom of a cloud
And I am writing to you
There is no beginning
The son throws itself to the ground
The bottom of the exhale
The transition is as dying
A white dwarf
Of the spirit
Is it terrifying
You once asked me
Shutters in quake
Of the spirit
The cuttings
The earth exhaling in wind
And I am writing to you
The gates of hell
Two night birds
Locked in my stomach
Angels
Locked in my stomach
I am writing to you
And all of the sudden
Everything hurts
It’s the way of a motor
Light trapped in the cylinder body
Ignited in compression
You once asked me of heaven
Light trapped in cylinder body
Ignited in compression
Violent as a star
I write to you
We all wanted
To hear this wind breathe
Its always moving
It is not for everyone
This heaven
This hunger
As If I Held Old Meditations on Pork
Dawn’s light would stir slow
in the morning, and I would be drawn
as my grandfather to wrapper, meat, crusty
sow belly and the boy at the edge of town,
high in the mountains
that would stand on the edge of the happy
river clapping, under faded tree light, soft
hands, laughing, watching the bats,
dip.
Drawn to him, dancing with doctors,
chest heaving, exaltation.
Me, in and out of fever.
Him, diarrhea dribbled down reedy legs.
My mother, clammy hands shielding
my immature eyes
from the truth in the small
sanatorium.
And death would smell like rot flesh and wrapper,
crusty, pork belly
on the table next to you.
I wonder
if there are still young boys
in small mountain towns
who clap
and watch the bats dip,
sonar.
28: How Can We Then Return to Happy Flight?
pat on the bottom and cry, and breathe, and breathe again
like weed to weed to weed
I was born my mother says, by water, a puddle Black bird American wailing Coot
fattening on thin reeds in elevated deep pond
legs stretched, feet bigger than head, like her insides understood
pulled by jagged pinching teeth
before she did, that I would always be on the move
moved to mountainous precipitous body
searching for a body, one like mine in wilderness
through droop arched bill
when I was born, I was already walking shores was already dying, was already
you, clouding steep shoreline ravenous to home
touching the world too much so they caged me, a brooder, a month
only knowing growing
still under heat lamp to let you all catch up
like the burden of life must be eaten slowly
when I was born, it was a cold month my mother said
devoured in the spread of seedling
her body heat entered the egg of me the way a mothers does
I lift you into mouth
clutching little life
so you may grow on my insides
when I was born, I became, clutching maybe her last warm breath, alive
spread like roots in crop
breathe again, and breathe again, and breathe again
you are only a seed, to flower that no one has loved
pat warm chest and cry
grow as feelings, to weed to weed to weed
Ursa Major
I used to say my mother was as beautiful and black as night. A black night great bear
wrapping me in her arms. Used to say she was like this perpetual celestial cluster night bear,
was like purple, a swirl, and was not like a, was like the, was the constellation Ursa Major,
the great bear black in the sky with her teeth around faint eyed lynx. Biting bear blood pools
at the end of her clenched jaw dropping dew shoot stars down to this earth.
I used to tell people I was born of this earth, born of the soil where one of her sprite bear
stars mixed with milky sappen ash clay and sprouted like mold from this dirt little hairs that
became my fur, my furry body. I used to lay under bruised plum sky, my back, alight, bare
against grass, pinned to ore, my chest pleading with air, eyes hoping to catch sight of her
overstepping ether. I used to point her out to shadows. Satellite bear
in flight, that’s her. So far away, and like this night, not the, this. Ursa Major, the greater,
black in the beautiful sky dim lit constellation, so far away, beyond twilight and bare.
And you know, they never believed me, could never understand how this bear could fly
every night and never need hug this green and brown and black and white bare ground,
this Ursa Minor, this
rooted little black bright bear.
Still Beating
after Derek Sheffield’s “A Good Fish”
My guide does not say,
jerk that bitch.
No, Rip its god-damned lip off.
They’re steelhead not soft mouthed book worms, I mean, brook trout.
And I know as sure as a pock-spotted cloud to a November day,
to lack of sleep-smeared eyes
the shrapnel sea eagle, preening,
well fed on the far bank willow
knows what I do not—
how to catch a fish.
Knows the pools my guide will swing wide on,
the pools he will plummet and dip his oars into
as a dance that lasts just long
enough for me to pass another fish,
miss another unripped lip.
Eagle laughs.
I know what he doesn’t, though,
The empty full rack in the back of the minivan,
the cans that rattled on the way to the dock that morning.
The smudge of charcoal under our fire pit eyes.
What it means, ceremony, mourning.
Know how to interpret the formality of melted soles.
The bottoms of our feet. Blackened. Raw. Fire. Bring water.
Amen. And what my friend Sheekee, Wolf, meant when he said
We never grow up, only out, only howl,
and they will ask us to never cry as wound again.
My lost moon friend, drunk brothers never bother to sleep,
a hangover is a matter of course for a fisherman,
and
so
of course, some days.
Some mile past Eagle
our guide finally asks me,
wondering if I would to eat his offering from cold mitten fingers—
a photograph,
the capturing of my first winter run hen.
Amen, he says, names her someday fish.
Grins. Squats. Spits chew spit.
Or was it Sunday fish—
holy mother of the river with a hole
splitting her stigmata mouth?
I hold her gently. I am to kill her. As our tradition, to eat her mineral salt
still beating heart.
And I wonder if her eyes see my eyes,
see my fresh watery tears drowning
the hollows.
And when I blink to rub them gone
I wonder if when I open them, it will all be gone—
if the guide will no longer be there crouching, bottom
to water in this river, my holy place.
Holding my too-expensive phone to his eyes.
And if the hen, her too will be gone.
And if I blink again
then the river— if this river, then,
only the river will remain.
and what we may give
on this a.m. radio station
a woman says
that whales make
the loudest noise
of any creature
and if we are blessed to have him
this is what we will teach him our glowing offspring
our killer whale son
to click
to whistle
to pulse
to never echo
to never echo our past
to scream
to avoid
capture
to make the loudest noise he can
to forever be seen
to be seen
heard
felt in ways
we never have
to never echo our past
to make the loudest noise
he can
to be seen
they will speak of him
our
black and white son
glowing
Jarrett Ziemer holds a BA in Professional and Creative Writing from Central Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Colorado University. Jarrett was a 2024 Jack Straw Fellow, and his work has been supported with awards from Deep Wild Journal, Dreamers Magazine, The Atlanta Review, and Litfuse. You can find Jarrett’s work in About Place Journal, Belmont Story Review, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, and in other publications.
Read two Letter to America poems by Jarrett Ziemer: “These Brazil Nut Nigga Toes” and “lips to feet”.
Header photo by Subphoto.com, courtesy Shutterstock.
