4 Poems
by Zachary Schomburg
LEAVING THE HOUSE
We leave the house for the first time. Or, more accurately, the house rots away from around us. The sun is blinding. Our parents look young and happy in the sand. Or they look relieved. They are playing volleyball, just the two of them, and they are doing the opposite of what you would think a good volleyball player should do, working together to keep the ball in the air. There is nothing special about them. By this I mean we spill out of their bodies, and then they don’t take enough photographs, and then their bodies climb down a very tall ladder into a dark secret door just as they promised.
FJORDS OF DEATHS
There is a place in this world where my deaths live, on the west coast of Spitsbergen, thawed from the steep cliff walls the same day I thawed off, like a fossil, from the back of my mother’s frozen head. They bide their time in the endless silent sunlight, the endless silent night, making up beautiful songs that only one of them will get to sing.
TUNGUSKA EVENT
People have started behaving as if they’ve been destroyed by an asteroid. They’re sleeping on the floor like flattened fiery trees. How can I carve out an exact life from this mess of everyone in the world’s days? I cannot even seem to make a dinner with the ingredients in this cupboard in this kitchen disemboweled and on its side in this forest in central Siberia. I’ll look at anything just to avert my eyes.
NEIGHBORHOOD PLAGUE
My neighbors have been dying, one after the other in a row, each day, from east to west. You told me that if I didn’t want to end up dead like my neighbors, that I should keep moving west. That seems like the last direction I’d want to move in.