Poetry from Kristin Zimet

I Sleep with Tigers

I sleep with tigers since you died; two of them
press against my flanks. Halving the bed,
they cannot sheathe their claws. The glass eyes
have no lid. No deck of oracles can make them
tame. I take a needle to long bodies packed
with sawdust, because it seems that one has torn
the throat out of the other. I dream heavy breath,
blood stink on fur, shreds of muscle stringy in
the teeth. I grasp them at midnight, twin promises
that death is in the grasses, its tail switches, its eyes
never lose focus, and every one I love is feeding
by the waterhole in the same herd, and I can see
as well as they can which ones limp or straggle.

Latasha By Night

Tucked in tight, Sungirl suckles on sleep.
Nothing stirs but the clock.

Moongirl’s eyes float open, firefly sparks.
It’s her hour. She’s not dreaming

and she’s not awake. She slips out alone
to play. Pours her shadow out.

Back and forth it swings; teeters between
know and imagine, want and invent.

Blank cement sparkles with mica, moths’
furred antennae brush her face.

Will she remember how much room there is
minus color, or what blocks

her non-body slides right through? No one
gets to tell her what is real,

what’s possible, how she’ll wake to scrape
her knees and knuckle down.

Over her three moons—was, is, and will be—
lean, crowning the black.

Midnight

Now I have let the hourglass lie level in my hand,
sands given in full, in one direction;
not one grain trembles toward
the open end.

Now the broom-clean house awaits walk-through,
swept of everything, except behind the stove
a plastic horse a new child will find,
caught in a gallop;

and the trucker sleeps with a full van on the hilltop,
with bureaus and bedsteads strapped tight
to the inner frame, idling in front
of the next house.

Now the avenue sleeps stripped of the charged hum,
vendors, messengers who rushed and pushed
to deliver, brisk and new-wound
as I was once;

and each apartment block, a winter hive, quivers,
winged bodies shifting places for the queen,
as in my heart, memories pulse
of you and you.

Now over plaza, playground, park, construction site,
moons nod together: child limned in sunlight,
woman gravid with purpose,
and this old one, bent

over the good night to bless the space, who lays
herself cleanly to rest like a whale’s ribs,
forming a white cathedral
on the smooth strand.

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Kristin Camitta Zimet is the author of Take in My Arms the Dark, a book of poems, and the co-author of A Tender Time: Quaker Voices on the End of Life. She was the long-time editor of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. Her poems are in a great many journals in eight countries and have been performed in venues from arboretum to concert hall. Also a surreal photographer, her work has appeared in galleries, museums, and city streets.