Boo!: A Bailey Library/WCC Poetry Club Anthology

A Bailey Library/WCC Poetry Club Anthology Edited by Tom Zimmerman

Delilah Webb •2•

A Bailey Library/WCC Poetry Club Anthology Edited by Tom Zimmerman

•3•

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS • This Boo! Anthology, featuring work by WCC students, faculty, staff, and alumni, is a joint production of the Bailey Library and the WCC Poetry Club, at Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor MI. Special thanks to the Bailey Library staff, especially Molly Ledermann, for helping make this book happen.

Book design by Tom Zimmerman.

Copyright © 2018 the individual authors and artists.

The works herein have been chosen for their literary and artistic merit and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Washtenaw Community College, its Board of Trustees, its administration, or its faculty, staff, or students. www.wccnet.edu/resources/library/welcome wccpoetryclub.wordpress.com

Delilah Webb •4•

• CONTENTS • Words Betty Adams Maryam Barrie Manal Chishty Anthony Davis Lilly Kujawski Diane M. Laboda E.L. Meszaros Ron Pagereski Wanda Kay Sanders Scott Schuer Delilah Webb Tyler Wettig KD Williams Tom Zimmerman

I want to come alive Holiday Spirit I’m Jack Imagining a Serial Killer Fog For Whom the Bell Tolls A Working Definition No Words Neurosis Polyvalence No"body"home The Cave Wind Intact It’s Still There, I Just Don’t See It. The Last of the Coma Tapes Empty Plate Crazy Love Monster Sonnet

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 18 19 21 23 25 27 28 30 31

Images Delilah Webb Tom Zimmerman Zach Baker

Fr cover, 2, 4, 9, 16, 29, bk cover Fr cover, 8, 15, 26, 31, bk cover Fr cover, 17, 20, 22, 24, 32, 33, bk cover

•5•

• BETTY ADAMS • I want to come alive Feed me your demons free me from inside feel me taking over I want to come alive Pop my top like a jack in the box cut my strings like Gepetto break my locks like Houdini I want to come alive Shatter your inner ceiling slash your countering thoughts clear out your skeleton ridden closet I want to come alive Feel the pain you’ve been harboring feed the depths of your soul face your darkest fears I want to come alive Don’t stay docile don’t be meek do not dare be mild I want to come alive.

•6•

• BETTY ADAMS • Holiday Spirit Ghosts, ghouls, goblins soon to be Grinches in green Buckle up your broomsticks Witches, it’s time for Halloween.

Having found their holiday, phantoms, fears, and frights, freakishly enough they all come out at night.

So when the critters creep and when the shadows crawl, try your best to go to sleep, child, recoiled into a fetal ball.

And if the tossing, turning, twisting of dreams leaves you in a waking nightmare, just take a step or two outside into the cold and deadened air.

Ignore the feeling of watchful eyes following your every step; ignore the rising heart rate and the hairs on the back of your neck— For it’s only this time of year when your imagination runs astray so unleash your mind and its cruelest beasts and celebrate this, the scariest of holidays.

•7•

• MARYAM BARRIE • I’m Jack Last night I got her alone before I could whip my blade out she pulled me up for a kiss her foul mouth all fastened on her hand fumbling my crown drawing my hands to her loose breasts, her heat dripping at a touch, she couldn’t wait for me to enter I am always ready my knife is stiff and sharp and always craving more.

She got a few screams off, but I know how to calm the ladies.

Tom Zimmerman •8•

• MARYAM BARRIE • Imagining a Serial Killer He dragged her into the bushes, left her open eyes hoping for blue above. There was regret but there was no point, it was over. He brushed the leaf litter over her, hoping for a warm winter, a warmer spring, hoping she would leak herself back into the earth. The young boy was ready, he was willing, he was afraid to say no. This was a time of play, of getting away with it. There is a lot of satisfaction in that secret knowing that chuckles inside the mind, pleased with itself, happy to be hidden in the dark.

Delilah Webb •9•

• MANAL CHISHTY • Fog A thick layer, Settles before the eye.

Thick.

Suffocating.

Dark.

It lurks, Through the Night, And into the early Morning.

Threatening to swallow you whole.

Something, That you cannot escape.

You turn on your headlights, A weak attempt of attack.

It comes at you terrifyingly.

Your weak attempt, Is revenged back at you, And you are blinded.

You have no sight range.

You surrender to the ambush.

Let It swallow you……

Ensnare you……

Scare you……

Imprison you…...

• 10 •

• ANTHONY DAVIS • For Whom the Bell Tolls The bell rings across this wretched town. Neighborhood homes broke down. . . Gloomy alleys far from the valley. . .

Abandoned parks with drug houses as our landmark.

No matter how fast you run. . . You won’t get far. When the bell rings at night the Grim Reaper is awoken once again. . .

When the night crawls so do the dead. . .

Watch out for his scythe, he loves to cut heads. . .

Just look at all the pumpkin heads roam at night. . . You try to hide in an abandoned crack home. . . From the Reaper. . . The setting couldn’t get any creepier. . . You begin to get anxious with sweat heating up like a fever. . . The Grim Reaper does this for his leisure. . .

The Grim Reaper has reaped your soul. . . For whom the bell tolls.

• 11 •

• LILLY KUJAWSKI • A Working Definition It’s falling twelve stories. No, it’s trying to stand upright with two broken legs. It’s like unweaving the parts of myself I’ve sewn together so meticulously. Ripped apart seams. Like bloody fingernails. It’s a sharp chest. Sharp sharp sharp. It’s a nervous coil in my gut. Or it’s not in my gut, it’s in my throat. So my words come out flat. Messy and rushed. Maybe it’s these lips. How they can’t stay together and how they won’t move apart. It’s all the long car rides, my foot riding the gas. It’s Fleetwood Mac because that’s the only calm that’ll pick up my heartbeat. Can’t sleep, can’t sleep. Slept too long and missed everything. It’s my cracking knuckles. Tangled hair. Knots like a tree. Here I was counting the rings, wishing them broken. It’s like getting the wind knocked out of me over and over and over. It’s the magician’s trick. Tied me up, I couldn’t get out.

Sawed my body in two for the sake of entertainment. My bloody halved torso. The carpet now stained. You don’t want to clean it up again. We’ve been through this before, haven’t we? It’s all too much.

I’m all too much. God, watch me splinter myself into trembling pieces. It’s all the doctors notes signed. And then unsigned. Until it looks like how I wanted it to. Feel me in this moment. Reach beyond my breasts, my ribcage, pull out my collapsing lungs, teach me to breathe again. Feel my insides churning. Can you get any closer than this? For once, tell me who I am, so I don’t have to make it up anymore. I’m tired of guessing. I’m tired of raw skin. I’m tired of the screaming. I’m trying to cherry blossom into something I find beautiful. I wish I knew how to undo all the Bad pulsing through my mind to my esophagus, down to my thighs. I wish I knew how to surgically remove all the unpleasant. Cut my abdomen open, carve out the ugly with a scalpel. Burn it with all the chemical waste my body has played host to. Parasites. Disease. Smoke it out. My body, feverish. Burning.

• 12 •

• DIANE M. LABODA • No Words A stranger knocked at the door.

I could see his face in the shadows, it was familiar—the same face locked in a portrait on the mantelpiece.

I listened as his deep voice rasped my name, “Open up, boy.”

I froze, hand on doorknob, feet curling away from the threshold, wanting to flee.

His voice rattled the glass as if it were from the throat of God or Lucifer.

“Now, boy!” echoed down the hall and out the back door, and I followed.

The woods seemed miles farther away than this morning when I walked through them to school. Trees seemed ominously close, reaching to catch my arm for him, stop me dead.

I heard more footsteps than my own, lashing through ivy and saplings and saw grass, but I dare not turn without losing my way, losing my soul.

I had no words to give a warning, none to deter the figure from its path, none to raise a prayer, none to plead leniency, none to signal where my father would stand over my limp body, grinning.

• 13 •

• DIANE M. LABODA • Neurosis I wonder how they survive those eye-less things, the ones that move around the room, hovering just above the floor, almost, but never quite, bumping into my legs.

They hum, those eye-less things, a tune just off my hearing as if to say to one another there are legs afoot in our space, dance lively, step sharp, reach around.

They glide past me, those eye-less things, and shimmer when they pass from room to room as if giving up a toll to the doorjamb-gnome for multiplying in the parlor.

They commune under the chairs, seeking haven from legs and rungs, seeking dust bunnies residing there, whipping them up in clouds and depositing them firmly in the corners behind the couch.

They settle around midnight, those eye-less things, leaving me alone to my other neuroses and line up against the wall.

I want them to know they’re welcome so I leave the candles burning and lock the door.

• 14 •

• E.L. MESZAROS • Polyvalence Language is constantly changing, ever-shifting in its connotation and experience. When I write a word a sentence a paragraph my meaning is concrete and monovalent, my pencil-on-paper might as well be chisel-on-stone. But the second the words spill out of me they shift, not a solid content to hold their own but a liquid glossing over crevasses bleeding out staining more than was intended.

Words are monuments to a culture of the seconds months years millennia past and what they say isn’t what I said.

Authorial intent is a ghost that haunts the written word.

It is interesting only in the way that ghost stories are interesting, filtering perspective with the sepia of nostalgia. It puppets the meat of the living the meaning but wears it like an ill-fitting sweater.

My written words are dead and the only spark of life is the meaning that you read into them.

Tom Zimmerman • 15 •

Delilah Webb • 16 •

Zach Baker • 17 •

• RON PAGERESKI • No"body"home I enter the old abandoned house to escape the driving rain. Car broke down just up the road. I don't know why I came in here. To ask the broken windows and cobwebs for help? I step over a missing floor board, I see an old candy wrapper blow past. I step on an old naked baby doll, it squeaks "Ma Ma!" A wrinkled water stained calendar on the wall from fifteen years ago. A few discarded, moldy clothing items litter the floor. I realize I have walked into a family's legacy. Where are they now? Did their dreams die here? Did this broken down hulk of a once proud mansion at one time ring with laughter? I pass before a cobweb shrouded mirror, see my own perplexed image. Who else has looked into this reflecting pool? Were they smiling? Or did they see themselves with tears looking back? I begin to wonder, is this the house which was foremost on the news many years ago? The house where the young woman, distraught over the loss of her husband, took her own life and the life of her little girl? I have to leave, get back to my stalled car to wait for help.

I shouldn't have come in, I treaded on the past. I am feeling very unsettled, disheartened. I hurry away through the rainy mist. In the wind behind me I hear, "Ma Ma"!

• 18 •

• WANDA KAY SANDERS • The Cave Last night I had that dream again— the one where I am walking through a narrow tunnel, the ceiling only inches from the top of my head, dripping with algaefilled water. Beneath my bare feet was a muddy murky floor and I could tell I was stepping on earthworms. Behind me with each step I took forward the cave was imploding till I had no path to retrace. Before me the front seemed to be exploding, growing outward so I could see dim light but the closer I got to the end the further away the opening became.

I began to panic—suffocating from the tight small space. The algae and lichen, the murky floor was slowly taking my breath away. I began to run. I thought that if I ran fast enough maybe I could reach the small opening before it disappeared. But all that did was make me stumble and fall.

The worms and the algae seemed to grow up and fasten around my hands and feet. They kept me from moving.

I remember screaming, flaying uselessly as they bound me tighter and tighter. Soon they were in my mouth spreading down my throat till my life breath was gone and I • 19 •

became in time part of that murky floor—just a skeleton. Yet even then I evaporated down into fossil fuel. My bones were in the dark earthen ground where the drills, the miners found a new purpose for my life— no not that, my death, only my death, serves a good purpose.

Zach Baker • 20 •

• WANDA KAY SANDERS • Wind There’s a gentle breeze a-blowing From the windows to the hall.

It wafts across each doorway Till it finds the sought for one.

In the shadows of this evening Standing there against the wall, In scathed and dusty oakwood, Stands the bookcase all alone..

The books lined up inside it give hints about their age, when times themselves were simpler and readers dog eared each favorite page.

Now the books are the survivors all that in this deserted house remains.

Ghosts of long dead patrons like the wind softly whispers as day begins to wane. This abandoned house, framed by dimming light, watches for the sun to slip away into the darkness of the night.

Where once again there’s music.

Happy couples laugh and dance.

Characters from each book bring This library back from death.

Throughout the moonlight hours Till just before break of day, the Singing and music will continue Till time to rest again.

• 21 •

No laughter in the daytime. No Music or merry dance. The books, the ghosts will wait till night fall to once more celebrate.

Zach Baker • 22 •

• SCOTT SCHUER • Intact I don’t really know when the dream began, as such, just the usual somnambulistic negotiation of mazes in stored memory and apartments from the past, interspersed with fits and starts of waking in goose-bumpy confusion. Was it a ghost? A shadow? A corneal blotch in my middle-night eyeball? These moments were often accompanied by audible, panicky gasps (TTttthhaaaaa!), prompting my wife, Maeve, to react with comforting tones of sleepy irritability. This temporality continued awhile, just the black and grey fuzz of ambient night time light, until a faint sense of intrusion played through our grey and black space. Was it here? Elsewhere?

A part of me now, softly engaged, left the warm safety of bed and descended the abyss of a stairway immersed in nocturnal narrative, playing out in real time.

Stepping sock-footed into the dim living-room light, I felt a sharp “crunch” on the floor. My eyes adjusted revealing the shattered remnants of our wall-sized window sprinkled over the carpet like ice chunks on moonlit winter water, mirroring my shock and warning of chaos to come. A shaking, alabaster hand (mine?) drew back the wind-blown curtain from the anarchic outline in the missing glass.

This was not a professional job—this was an act of dangerous desperation.

Thinking about a bloody foot—at that moment of fight-or-flight revelation, my slo-mo head turned to see Maeve’s own sleepy mask of fear and confusion, also alabaster in the light between our home and the night. Like cats on point, our heads turned toward the sound of metal scraping metal at our front lock, and the mumbling from 2, 3, maybe more voices—quiet, conspiratorial. Suddenly, the violation became real with the thundering of shoulders against an aging, straining wooden door—our wooden door.

The invaders burst in looking surprisingly chipper and upbeat (I’m not sure how I perceived this) and began shouting commands to submit, with threatening undertones of violence. I don’t remember the words spoken, but a clear vocabulary of lines being crossed. I • 23 •

don’t recall races or faces, clothing or the sizes of the invaders, but one guy watched us, one guy rifled our collection of books, curios, knick-knacks, and techno gadgetry (being the only objects with any actual monetary value). And… in my periphery, what I think was a skinny woman dashed upstairs – the same sounds of ravage jarring our most personal spaces.

Just then, I thought about my stamp collection. It’s not super valuable, but a careful record in my otherwise quixotic life—loving curatorial detail over years of devotion. Almost, as on cue, the guy ripped the stamp binders off of the shelf and flung them resentfully across the room—into the growing heap of ruin.

Then…nothing, just the familiar fog of emergence, of spinning toward consciousness. No resolution. No epilogue to give meaning to these moments, just a slow eye-opening and the soft sound of rain spatter in the first morning light. Despite the concerns of another work day, the people, pets, and possessions most precious to me are, for now, still intact.

Zach Baker • 24 •

• DELILAH WEBB • It’s Still There, I Just Don’t See It. It moved. I saw it move! I whispered to myself as I lay in my bed. My blanket was my shield. Covered from head to toe, I looked out a small peek hole that I created. There was a creature forming in my dirty clothes basket. In the dark room, all the light my older sister permitted was the one she couldn’t turn off, the moon. An arm dangled over the side of the hamper with long claws at the end. I could make out a jester’s hat. His face was covered in thick, white, peeling make-up as he peeked at me through the holes in the side. A large, glowing, circle pierced the side of the basket forming its only eye. Its mouth shined brilliantly in the moonlight. Two rows of small, sharp teeth, with a long, creepy grin too wide for its face. The moon left a dusting of light over the dirty clothes, just enough to help me see what would inevitably behead and disembowel me in my sleep.

My sister would find my detached head next to hers when she woke up, and a large puddle of blood where I slept. My intestines would be strung like garland from our room to the hallway and down the stairs wrapping around the banister, with my 6-year-old body as the chandelier. Drips of blood and bits of flesh would hang from my entrails like bloody crystals as they drip onto the floor and seep into the cracks and crevices of the wood. Small blood stains would appear all through the upper floor in the shape of tiny footprints tracking in every direction, made by my murderer. My sister would be ecstatic. I carefully reach across to poke my 10-year-old hero, to see if she’s awake.

“Uhh,” she grumbles. “What?” She had been dealing with my over-active imagination for a while and was probably tired of it and irritated by me waking her up, again.

“It moved, I saw it move.” I tell her wide-eyed from inside my blanket. I was terrified.

“Shut up and go to sleep,” she tells me.

“It’s gonna eat me,” I squeak.

She opens one eye, just to peek at me. “What’s going to eat you?” she asks, letting out a long breath.

• 25 •

“Him!” I express, jetting my hand out of my shield, as I point to the hamper.

She gets out of bed, and fluffs the dirty clothes, then pushes them down.

“Is he still there?” she asks, annoyed.

“I don’t know. I don’t see him.”

She drags herself back to her bed and lays down.

Just because I don’t see him doesn’t mean he isn’t there, I say to myself. Where is he now? I eye the room looking for him, or a friend of his, who desires to kill me. Eventually, exhaustion gets the better of me and I fall asleep.

Tom Zimmerman • 26 •

• TYLER WETTIG • The Last of the Coma Tapes black candle darks a vanitas of lily-wreath and cadaver-dog: peels and hungers at happy’s pareidolia, scabbed amygdala. apostates screaming vermillion at the old shroud, bulwark-romantics shading under a furrowed boston fern: unborn, the man is complete.

Tom Zimmerman • 27 •

• KD WILLIAMS • Empty Plate I forgot to eat dinner And I found myself thinking About the food at my funeral.

Would it be better for my mother to eat food that reminds her of me?

And then I remembered that in order to die, My mother must die And to think it will be before me is too much— I got a new cat last weekend To keep my cat company And for the past three days, she’s thrown up on a different rug.

My partner and I aren’t upset with her, But we do wish she could pick a spot And stick to it, at least, or if she could tell us what’s wrong But she screams in this tiny way that says I’m fine!

I’ve found myself crying tears of joy no less than three times since I brought her home.

I mean, look at these lives and how they fill my one bedroom apartment with activity— I could spend my whole life just watching these cats, feeding them, cleaning up, And I nearly do, but I do it mindfully, aware and at ease Because this, my friends, is not the distraction.

This is the main event.

I don’t remember leaving the party, but I’m told My aunt made spaghetti at midnight and I licked the plate clean Before leaving the house without so much as a see ya— But how strange, to hear a story about yourself...

Yeah, I say, sounds like me, but a secret dread builds— What other empty plates have I left around town?

• 28 •

I felt a funeral in my brain While paused at a red light.

Those pesky thoughts try to reach me like arms from hallowed ground, But to be grounded means something different.

It means to be connected to the earth and grateful for the soil and for feet, And if you feel a cold hand grasp tightly, well, You’re meant to admire all the fingers, feel all the bones!

The chill descending, quickly, notice it!

All these sensations tell you you’re still alive, For now.

It’s true, death is for the living—the ceremony, the worry—will never really touch us Because by then, we’ll be gone.

No poem to write, nobody to tell after, hell, No after to tell about at all.

So before then, there’s only now and the words we write— listen.

Delilah Webb • 29 •

• TOM ZIMMERMAN • Crazy Love “All I do is love!” the murderous man-child rants, his hostage squirming for her life: you’re watching bad TV again. I’m jealous, drinking beer here at the kitchen counter, pasta water bubbling like a cauldron, chicken drawn and quartered, student essays in my briefcase: Hamlet and Macbeth.

I’m melting wax for sufferers I’ve read and loved: for Poe and Lovecraft, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. These living dead hold power over now: black roses blooming in my head and chest. I’m cracking beers—for you, for me.

I’ll put away this knife, I swear, and join you on the couch: I have so much to share.

• 30 •

• TOM ZIMMERMAN • Monster Sonnet Hell yes, pale vampires creep in shadows, suck the pap of innocence. And werewolves bay at slivered silver moons that rake the muck of swamps where gilled, web-fingered demons slay defenseless wanderers, where dragons hiss, on guard at portals coupling world to world.

The Thing from outer space rebuffs the kiss of death: another city’s crushed and hurled, recycled in oblivion. Dawn’s wound bleeds zombies, incubi, the golem old as mud. All ravening for blood, all tuned to music thundering through temples gold with fire, devouring reason’s withered fuss: the monsters are, have always been, in us.

Tom Zimmerman • 31 •

Zach Baker • 32 •

Zach Baker • 33 •

ADAMS BAKER BARRIE CHISHTY DAVIS KUJAWSKI LABODA MESZAROS PAGERESKI SANDERS SCHUER WEBB WETTIG WILLIAMS ZIMMERMAN