Poetry

A masterful and engaging work. Zane Kotker has utilized a life’s worth of experience and the trained sense of a novelist to create a clear and poignant collection of poems.   —  Massachusetts Center for the Book

Poems From: Old Ladies in the Locker Room and Pool, Finishing Line Press, June 2011

Order from Finishing Line Press

Driving the Bay Road Home

Even today I’m apt to think
maybe I’ll buy that house
get married
have a couple of kids
especially in March when driving
the Bay Road home
late in the afternoon with snow
around and blue clouds going plum
as the sun’s not quite down
and then I remember —
I’ve done all that:
the house is mine,
the husband dead, the children grown.

Hear Zane read it below:

Margot, First Among Us

All while you are dying, I am living:
sun burns down through yellow leaves,
steam rises,
earth lies ready to receive.

Air slips into the bellows of our lungs —
that’s all you do now, breathe,
and carry on the hidden chemistries,
while I hear crickets in the field,
tea simmering,
taste apples firm as jicama,
feel floor flat against bare foot.

Giver of gifts, you give this last, to be.
Opener of doors, you open first and go.

Hear Zane read it below:

 
Billions I Have Never Known

Here I am in this dark room
alone with car lights on the wall.
No, not alone.
There’s the viburnum planted
in the morning, some ruddy buds
of dogwood near the road,
phone numbers of my children in my head,
and all the dead.

Billions I never knew,
could not contain –
yet secret in my DNA, they lead me
back and back among Olduvai’s bones,
to standing up, to using tools, to frontal sex.
These are my family now,
the ones who keep me company.
Goodnight, I say to them. And then, goodnight.

Hear Zane read it below:

Old Ladies in the Locker Room and Pool

Locker Room: Artists’ Assessment

Intent on anecdote and getting dry,
we naked ladies stroll about the locker room,
toweling pendulous guts and grain-fed haunches,
unperturbed by flesh that hangs off arms
still damp from Windex-colored water soft as air–
Lucien Freud has nothing on us ladies here.

Young women move among us like gods;
mothers with one and two-year olds
sundress the perfect bodies at their knees,
pull bathing suits up over training pants,
crooning don’t fuss, good job, good job
then shed their own cocoons of winter wool.
So beautiful they are, their rounded forms,
we understand Renoir, forgive his repetitions,
try to grasp exactly how we got from them to us.

Hear Zane read it below:

Listen here for Zane Kokter’s interview
with Daisy Mathias on Poetry A’ La Carte November 2012.