Martha Zweig
 
 

Paradise

I stood security the first six weeks.
Nobody minded the moon. The sun
you could reason with. Other
weathers, otherwise.

We smuggled a tunnel whole into the withering mountain:
a gut, an intubation,
fed it along length by strenuous length. Now &
then it kinked & squirmed. The mountain bristled hackles.

A few of us ran out of the same
time a few of us ran into: collisions, versions
& revisions of the vanishing act.

Before, since, I never scrambled so from fear.
The only camouflage is to lick oneself
newborn, covered with hide in the first place.


Petit Mal

Dire symptom, to wake up
in a headache, plus I forget what it’s of.
Afflictions’ placebos rev & throb down neural
runaways whose fancy flights collide:
let the airport owls win one. Empires away,
let the ragtag militants win one.

Or my nerves keen for a cigarette.
I’d pinch it in half, or some passerby’s
castoff goodsize butt. Distract: o
rememberize to me my first truelove,
the one not you, but I hasten I do
truelove you too– ever a next angelic & silkish

razzledazzle about, as if each brushoff-my-
shoulder might shrug itself into a wing.
As a scatter of barley summons insipid
soup to its next ingredient, so kicks-in
in-this-moment’s flashmob & whoops along
snarling a traffic of orange flagpersons at play.

Martha Zweig lives in Vermont. Her work has received Hopwood and Whiting awards. Poetry magazine featured three of her poems in 2010. Her collections include Monkey Lightning, Tupelo, 2010; What Kind, Wesleyan University Press, 2003; Vinegar Bone, Wesleyan University Press, 1999 and Powers, the Vermont Arts Council, 1976. Her MFA is from Warren Wilson College.