Fertilization by Lisa Zaran

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Counting the years of his absence,
the child’s repetition, I stand at the
door smoking a cigarette.

Ashes land like snowflakes on the
step of a bright Spring day.

My father sits inside a small box
with his eyes closed.

I paid cash for his ashes. Carried
them home on the floorboard of my
pickup.

Guru in seclusion, flesh and action
trapped. My father breathes motes,

flecks of dust, particles preserved
in a bed of pleura.

Deep inside a barefoot lung I empathize

About the Author: Lisa Zaran

LisaZaranBioLisa Zaran is the author of eight collections of poetry including Dear Bob Dylan, If It We, The Blondes Lay Content and the sometimes girl. She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices. When not writing, Zaran spends her days in Maricopa county jails assisting women with remembering their lost selves.

Cultivation by Lisa Zaran

My father’s spirit, built of plank, flew
into the afterlife’s eye like a stone thrown.

Old bone, I’m sure he made its ledge,
narrowly escaping the turnstile of reincarnation.

In that calm of death where even moss can be discerned
growing against the rivers edge,

his soul, unbidden, lifted as his heart
blued inside his breast. Slender as a
sprig on a silver buttonwood.

Oh good earth, he was a decent man.

About the Author: Lisa Zaran

Lisa Zaran is the author of eight collections of poetry including Dear Bob Dylan, The Blondes Lay Content, If It We and the sometimes girl. She is founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices, on online poetry journal in its twelfth year of publication. Lisa lives in Arizona where she works full time for a Community Service Agency serving individuals with substance use and mental health disorders

Distance by Lisa Zaran

My mother makes diacritical marks
over the language of my heart:
acute, grave, double grave.

Twelve years old, I do not think
about blooming into a woman.
I only wonder where she is,

what her mood is like, whether
she’ll come home that night,
if there’s light at the party.

hook, horn, rough breathing.

Like any requirement I love her,
in vertigo, in run-down weekly’s,
riding shotgun in her hatchback

as she drives us out of town at 3 a.m.
hiding yellow hair beneath
a tie-dye kerchief.

macron, dot, circumflex.

At a rest stop once in coconino
county, just shy of sheep gulch spring
she betrayed intimacy.

I was waiting for her, like always,
seated on the hood, my back
against the windshield,

her, scooting up beside me,
a cigarette between her lips.
On the inhale, short and quick

she pointed out Gemini, the twins.
On the exhale, she said: that’s us.
Which was and still is the closest

exclamation of love I’d ever received.
My heart festooned there,
white tiger, vermillion bird.

A laurel of hope, promise with the sound
of wild horses, want as white
as the moon, every bone glowing.

ring, comma, inverted breve, smooth breathing.

About the Author: Lisa Zaran

LisaZaranBioLisa Zaran is the author of eight collections of poetry including Dear Bob Dylan, If It We, The Blondes Lay Content and the sometimes girl. She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices. When not writing, Zaran spends her days in Maricopa county jails assisting women with remembering their lost selves.

Copper by Lisa Zaran

Two years ago I started collecting pennies. Not just any pennies: found pennies.  It began when the agency I worked for took a devastating turn.

My co-workers and I would huddle in private discourse trying to make sense of the changes happening around us. We wondered privately: what would happen and where would we go? During this upheaval, I began finding pennies in the most random places, unexpected but obvious.

So I’d pick them up.

I didn’t give it any thought at first until it manifested: I became convinced each penny held meaning.

Once when I walked through the parking lot toward my car engrossed in thought, hopeful for a positive outcome suddenly I noticed a bright penny on the ground next to the drivers side door. Instances continued to occur. Another time a penny sat Lincoln side up directly outside my closed office door perfectly centered on the floor.

It happened so often that I’d began looking for pennies. But, as soon as I became aware of looking, I never found a penny. It’s only occured when I wasn’t thinking about seeking pennies, but when I was wholly focused on something else. A worry, seeking closure, or looking for answers. Rushing towards or away from these concerns, a penny would be in my line of sight.

Like the time, at the end of a long and tumultuous day, I discovered a penny on the seat of my office chair. I had been in and out, up and down all day long,

I began saving the special pennies.

I had this sugar skull shaped piggy bank, bright yellow with flowers and hearts for eyes. It sat on a shelf simply because I liked it. I began dropping these found pennies into it. Finding change continued to happen to me.

I’d experience numerous occasions where I was talking in my head to whomever would listen: God, self, the universe of thought and ideas. About a concern of mine, seeking guidance, affirmation when a piece of change would appear in my path, sometimes a nickel or a dime but most often a penny.

The skull became fuller. A quarter. A half. Three-quarters full..

I began getting hopeful for the day it would be totally full. I thought, maybe with the money I’ll purchase a piece of local, outsider art to serve as a reminder. Maybe I’ll create a piece of outsider art! Maybe I’ll hand it all to a homeless person. I had time to decide as I still had a forehead to fill.

Not everyone in my life was aware of this penny-endeavor but some were, my children knew, a few co-workers and friends.

I came home from work on a typical Wednesday and remembered I had some found change in my purse. It’d been sitting in there for a couple months so I gathered it up (17 pennies and 1 dime). When I dropped the first piece of change in I noticed the sound first.

It took a second for it to register in my brain, the hair-breadth of added time for the first coin to stop it’s falling at the bridge of a nose and land instead where a throat might end.

The skull was empty.

Addiction acts in a person. The person then is forced to react or take the blow. It’s like standing perfectly still with a wall coming at you eighty, ninety miles an hour. It’s falling from a great height at high speed, hearing the splat of organs on impact before feeling it.

Addiction has needs. It can not be satisfied with acts of containment, measures of control. My son is an addict; he is always hungry.  There are bad days and then there are worse days.

The missing pennies could not have amounted to much in a dealers hand, one hit maybe, powder residue from a suboxone tab. My son is an expert at reacting to addiction.

I’m sure, with the pennies he found redemption, enough to take the razor-sharp edge off for an hour, maybe two.

My mind told me to be furious, to rage, to scream injustice until my throat bled. My body refused; it collapsed onto a sofa and wept, deserted by the ability to feel anger.

The coins, I thought, are better off. No longer piled and compacted in a glass head. They’re free to roam, to offer, to serve those much needier than I. I envisioned the tending each penny would do, like a silk thread stitching a wound.

Every penny that slipped from dealers palm to dealers palm, fell by the wayside, came to a stop in a gutter outside a convenience store held more value than its monetary equivalent.

I knew these pennies would be found again. Picked up by hands that had no idea this coin is suffused in hope, this one has strength. This coin freedom, that one grace.

This wasn’t me being tender or forgiving. This wasn’t letting go. This was me not reacting as a wall came at me eighty miles an hour, as I fell from a great height.

About the Author: Lisa Zaran

LisaZaranBioLisa Zaran is the author of eight collections of poetry including Dear Bob Dylan, If It We, The Blondes Lay Content and the sometimes girl. She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices. When not writing, Zaran spends her days in Maricopa county jails assisting women with remembering their lost selves.

Dear Life by Lisa Zaran

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It’s time to let the drunken nights
forget their intellectual ease.
Who cares, except maybe that guy
you were appointing loopy wisdom to,
with spit no less.

A thousand normal days and one lonely
evening just happens to catch you off guard.
The bar is a semblance of Paris, tiny glasses
and bites of cheese, boys with allergies and
persuasion.

On Monday the world will be a different place.
Traffic, obligations, friends. The boss
will come across articulately. You will do
what you need to do, desiring a good life.
God awful what’s happening to you.

Isn’t it?

About the Author: Lisa Zaran

LisaZaranBioLisa Zaran is the author of eight collections of poetry including Dear Bob Dylan, If It We, The Blondes Lay Content and the sometimes girl. She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices. When not writing, Zaran spends her days in Maricopa county jails assisting women with remembering their lost selves.

What Matters by Lisa Zaran

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It would be foolish of me to assume that a woman incarcerated
has done no wrong, yet here she sits in her stripes
that swim around her forlorn frame like organza,
pleasant as the cashier at my favorite neighborhood deli.

It would seem dangerous of me to approach this situation
with blind faith based on the notion that justice may
or may not have been served, whatever the case may be,
she is in jail.

There must be a preponderance of evidence somewhere.

It would be careless of me to place all my eggs in one basket
in regards to her impunity. I see by her shattered appearance,
social injustice or heresy, she is in custody. Forced to make
retribution, whether amendable or not. Not my place to say.

This is what I tell her: if life has taught me anything worth
listening to it is hope. I know what it feels like to lose it
and I know what it feels like to see a glimmer resurface,
like a buoy to heart in the body’s cold ocean.

About the Author: Lisa Zaran

LisaZaranBioLisa Zaran is the author of eight collections of poetry including Dear Bob Dylan, If It We, The Blondes Lay Content and the sometimes girl. She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices. When not writing, Zaran spends her days in Maricopa county jails assisting women with remembering their lost selves.

Motherhood 2016 by Lisa Zaran

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Perhaps I’m planning a diagram of a family structure.
Here is the beginning, a dot on a page, and what to call
this dot? Here.

About the Author: Lisa Zaran

LisaZaranBioLisa Zaran is the author of eight collections of poetry including Dear Bob Dylan, If It We, The Blondes Lay Content and the sometimes girl. She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices. When not writing, Zaran spends her days in Maricopa county jails assisting women with remembering their lost selves.

Afternoon, for Instance by Lisa Zaran

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we all go drifting from a dark bedroom
to a sunlit porch. even when a day feels
flattened and depression seems like the
only open door, hope abounds.

maybe it’s a skirt turning in summer sun
catching refractions of yellow light
maybe

it’s the gentle phrase of a stranger saying
have a nice day
maybe it’s just the afternoon
God’s mid-day break, sighing.

About the Author: Lisa Zaran

LisaZaranBioLisa Zaran is the author of eight collections of poetry including Dear Bob Dylan, If It We, The Blondes Lay Content and the sometimes girl.  She is the founder and editor of Contemporary American Voices.  When not writing, Zaran spends her days in Maricopa county jails assisting women with remembering their lost selves.