#zyzzyva

a violence intended to be inaccessible to the human eye

TUES. JULY 14, 11 am PST, Authors Jessica Pearce Rotondi (What We Inherit) & Lauren Francis-Sharma (Book of the Little Axe) will be featured on Lockdown Lit @ Lunch via Facebook livestream.

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Hosted by Booksmith and The Bindery, in partnership with Zyzzyva, this a weekly salon features a group of authors with books published during the coronavirus pandemic who have banded together to support one another.

Contributor Update, Sam Sax

Congratulations to Sam Sax for his recent poem Hangover 1.1.2019 published in ZYZZYVA’s issue 117.

Sam Sax is a queer, Jewish, writer & educator. He is the author of Madness (Penguin, 2017) winner of The National Poetry Series selected by Terrance Hayes & bury it (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Sam has received…

It isn’t easy to be kind,

nor to downhill ski to freedom.

I have decided to forsake

the picture window.

I have decided that

I will not take your name.

They saved the tiny baby on the north slope.

A cavalcade of snowmobiles

swarming up the mountain.

I have decided not to leave this freezing room.

I have decided to ricochet slowly

in the abundance of small corners.

This afternoon I will accuse a founding member.

I have decided not to sniff the hands of men.

(”Do Not Name The Baby ‘Snow Bear’”, Zyzzyva V. 34 #3)

The other day, a man I know

had his house stolen.

He loved his house.

It felt like a step down from

murder.

I was moved to learn on Wikipedia that

William Stafford was a pacifist.

Did you know that fireflies lick

and sniff excess oxygen from summer

air, not so the season will suffocate

but so the sky won’t burn

without supervision?

This honeyslick table on which I write

is a distant cousin of the holy ark.

I don’t write on the same table 

anymore.

William: I have no gods left, and you are dead but

for the internet, and a man is left without a home

and all that’s left is for all the living and lifeless

lightbulbs in the house to try their best to breathe

and recite together:

                                        we’re sorry we’re sorry

                                        catch fire we’re sorry

(”Pacifist”, Zyzzyva V.34 #3)

(Suggestions: I  visited the Wikipedia page for William Stafford and I found the following pieces:

The final poem he wrote, the morning of the day he died:

You don't have to / prove anything,' my mother said. 'Just be ready / for what God sends.'

What he said in an interview about poetry in 1971:

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.