Two Poems by Jaime Zuckerman

By Jaime Zuckerman

After an Argument
-with a fragment from Sappho

the sparrows
they let their wings down
& I let the dishes gather
I was not as I wanted
a contrail dissipating
instead I was a woman
a woman with only sparrows
I left the door open
the leaves & wind
let themselves in
I washed my body
it was without your body
& let the air dry my skin
it was without your
skin I let the sparrows in
they made a mess of things
I’m sorry I’m not sorry
the sparrows’ chirps
were like rain
I let them build their nests dear,
I let them stay

Shoveling My Neighbor’s Sidewalk in the Dark

Because he died during a snowstorm,
his sidewalk coated in ankle-deep snow.

Because once, when my car wheels were stolen,
he plucked the bolts from his grass & held them

out to me like a nest of eggs & I saw
his front teeth were missing.

Most of all, because he was relentless,
meticulous with every single snowfall.

How many times did I wake
at 5 AM to his shovel’s ceaseless scrape?

Or hedge trimming in the warm months?
He was always there, there before any of us

came to the neighborhood, replaced
chain-link, began calling it ours.

One summer, a family of raccoons made a home
in his chimney. He let them stay.

My windows looked onto that great wreck
of a house. From that vantage, I was the woman

in the sun-shafted window, watering a jade plant.
How many sunrises have I seen over his rooftop?

The shingles greyed, the lilacs grew.
Families came and went, decades of children

aged to adults, clapboards were painted pond green,
dogs’ lifetimes passed, each year

another parade. The Centre Street trolley tracks
were paved over, the old houses

converted to condos, the Hi-Lo turned
to Whole Foods, the school switched to a charter.

I knew little, except this one, insistent fact:
he kept a chair on the porch, for the event

of thunder, stopped whatever he was doing
to watch the storm unspool.

About the author:

Jaime Zuckerman is the author of two chapbooks, Letters to Melville (Ghost Proposal, 2018) and Alone in this Together (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) as well as recent or forthcoming poems in BOAAT, Diode, Fairy Tale Review, Foundry, Glass Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Thrush, and other journals. She serves as the associate editor for Sixth Finch and a senior reader for Ploughshares. She grew up in the woods but now lives and teaches in Boston, MA. Find her on Twitter @JaimeZuckerman or on Instagram @jaime.zuckerman.