Isis and Osiris
In dreams, the body calls the dark earth home.
But stitched together now, we drink and laugh.
We’re mummified, all wrapped in dying’s chaff
tonight. The brain’s been yanked, the painted dome-
roof smoked with zombie spices. Organs jugged
like hares. Remorse and Busyness, our twin
autistic children, scarabs scuttling in
these seven-holed sarcophagi we’ve lugged
for fifty-something years. We’ve rattled round
this life like baby teeth we pulled and kept
beyond the fairy’s theft. Our love is black
as Nephthys’s vagina, Nile unbound,
with any light occult and primal, swept
up in the flood that takes and gives life back.
Air
It turns my blue blood red. It lifts my hair,
a toddler’s Easter kite, the two crows, say,
that Scarlet barked at walking yesterday.
I’ve cracked the window in the gym, my lair:
I smell of fur and meat. Wife’s home, undoes
her necklace, clicking pearls still warm from her.
A burnt-leaves scent envelops us. The whirr
of crickets rises with my drunken buzz.
I haven’t had a drink, but visions pry
my mind’s tight lid: I feel the air that sheathes
a flying arrowhead, the air that breathes
with sight, that stokes a fire’s one red eye.
The darkness powders down, our two souls rise,
a fragrant smoke that fills the endless skies.
Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the writing center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His chapbook In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music appeared from The Camel Saloon Books on Blog in 2012. Tom’s website: http://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/
