Nights Your Wife Is Gone: Poems

NIGHTS YOUR WIFE IS GONE

POEMS

THOMAS ZIMMERMAN

Print version Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Zimmerman Digital version Copyright © 2012 by Thomas Zimmerman Acknowledgments I thank the editors of the following publications, which first published these poems, sometimes in slightly different form: Abandoned Towers: “Green Man in the Apennines” The Flea: “Dionysus and Apollo,” “Meteora,” “Nights Your Wife Is Gone” Goblin Fruit: “The Girl with Fish for Hair” Kaleidotrope: “Praise for What I Don’t Know,” “Rain Angel” La Lune Bleu Planete: “Happiness” Perpetual Magazine: “Midlife,” “Workhorse” Poor Mojo’s Alamanac(k): “Alive and Breathing in Thessaloniki” The Road Not Taken: “Americans in Oxford,” “Socrates Sandals” Scheherezade's Bequest : “Rereading A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Third Wednesday: “This Sonnet Is” Yellow Mama: “Dump Your Boyfriend and Come with Me,” “Just One of Us,” “Kerouac” “Labor Day” and “Memory Present” first appeared in Writers Reading at Sweetwaters: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose, edited by Chris Lord and Esther Hurwitz (Ann Arbor: Word ’n Woman, 2007).

“The Oceans of Our Mothers” first appeared in What the Dog Didn’t Eat, edited

by Tom Zimmerman (Ann Arbor: Washtenaw Community College, 2009).

“Redesign” first appeared in Ideation Scroll: WCC Poetry Club Responds to Gallery One’s At the Junction: Industrial Design, edited by Tom Zimmerman (Ann Arbor: Washtenaw Community College, 2009).

“Silver Seeker” and “Smudge” first appeared in Accidental Nuances, edited by Tom Zimmerman (Ann Arbor: Washtenaw Community College, 2007).

“To See Your Love Tonight” and “Green” first appeared in The Naked and the Clothed: A WCC Poetry Club Anthology, edited by Tom Zimmerman (Ann Arbor: Washtenaw Community College, 2008).

“White” first appeared in Poets at the Crossroads, edited by Anne Rubin and Tom Zimmerman (Ann Arbor: Washtenaw Community College, 2007).

My thanks to the members of the WCC Poetry Club for their camaraderie and inspiration and to Anne Rubin, Director of WCC’s Gallery One, for her hospitality. My love and gratitude to Ann. Book design by Tom Zimmerman. Zetataurus Press, c/o Tom Zimmerman, 2012 Marra Dr, Ann Arbor MI 48103, zetataurus@comcast.net zetataurus press | ann arbor mi

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NIGHTS YOUR WIFE IS GONE POEMS BY THOMAS ZIMMERMAN Contents Nights Your Wife Is Gone The Girl with Fish for Hair The Oceans of Our Mothers Redesign

5 6 7 8

To See Your Love Tonight Rain Angel Dump Your Boyfriend and Come with Me Alive and Breathing in Thessaloniki

10 12 14 16

Green Midlife Workhorse

18 19 20

Labor Day White Smudge Silver Seeker

22 24 26 28

This Sonnet Is Rereading A Midsummer Night’s Dream Praise for What I Don’t Know Happiness

31 32 33 34

Kerouac Just One of Us Memory Present

36 38 40

Americans in Oxford Green Man in the Apennines Dionysus and Apollo Socrates Sandals Meteora

42 43 44 45 46

Notes

47

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NIGHTS YOUR WIFE IS GONE Neruda’s lying facedown on the desk: Cien sonetos de amor, and Getz— Sweet Rain—is on the stereo. Now let’s just take a breath before a Dylanesque montage kicks in. A Guinness draft’s in front of you; the pasta’s on the boil. And here’s to Robert Bly: Don’t comb your hair. The seer’s gone blind. Don’t call your mother; she’ll just stunt your growth. Get torn to pieces; paint till dawn.

Don’t sweep the floor; don’t take the bottles back.

Plead guilty; you’ll be sentenced to a thousand years of joy. Leave scraps for hellhounds on your trail. Relax. The king’s in check. Attack.

The only thing you really know is now.

5

THE GIRL WITH FISH FOR HAIR The girl with fish for hair swam in the stream that feeds the wide Ohio—so the freed slave’s son maintained, his eyes turned pearls, his dream of ships and Egypt morphed to jazzman’s reed.

Phoenician sailors, Yankee whalers—those who’ve seen her yearned for art because the world, which seems all hers, then wounded them, and throes of guilt propelled the song, the salt clay hurled on potter’s wheel, the earth’s first alphabet.

She reigns in Baikal, Marianas, Lake Superior; she drinks the dreamt regret that swirls in Lethe, laps the artist’s wake.

Our plainsongs, paintings, totems, tomes on shelves— all hers, yet we who see her see ourselves.

6

THE OCEANS OF OUR MOTHERS We all begin part-fish, awash within the oceans of our mothers’ wombs.

We lurch headfirst from bedroom/website/classroom/church— these later wombs— to psychic states akin to birth a myriad times throughout our lives.

So did we dive, or fall, to find these truths?

A clearing in the woods:

like Shakespeare youths

in love with love,

we’ve broken bee-jeweled hives, been stung but eaten darkest honey, thick and rich and strange.

It was our fear we ate.

And swallow still.

The way out isn’t fate; it’s choice: the path is forked with forks, leaf-slick with branches that meander, grass- and mudhulled arteries that pulse with mothers’ blood.

7

REDESIGN “I love our bed,” you say, “but hate the way our closets, couches, stairs. . . .” I start to snore, to crack your code, your metaphors. . . . I soar so high above the Earth, so naked, jayalert. My flipbook psyche’s pages flip; I’m diving closer: stars like rivets, swirls of clouds like Pollock paint, the cultured pearls of city lights. . . . I land in snowmelt, slip in woods so lovely, dark, and deep, to find you here. I’ve come prepared, with compass, knife, and Moleskine book: its empty pages lined for drawings, symbols, words, and stories rife with meanings conjured by the dreaming mind.

Before we wake, let’s redesign our life.

8

9

TO SEE YOUR LOVE TONIGHT Unzip your skin, the mortal suit you’re strangling in, and wander shameless under stars beside the flame the river is this new-moon night, its musky fizz of current cool to touch, a snakequick fragrant jewel alive with change, eternal flux— At first, it’s strange to hang upon a bough the corpse you’ve worn and gone through pain to keep so trim and fit, but let it steep in cleansing air, convicted thief condemned to bear

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stale truths you’ve learned, for now your freshpeeled soul has turned to dance, clap hands, and sing—Here Tom, your lover, stands, beneath the tree, beside the stream, now flowing free with you among new worlds like coins a bridegroom’s flung.

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RAIN ANGEL Rain has drowned my house, a candle gutters

in my brain,

the roots of a crab apple cradle me: you hover above, with snakes and blossoms twined in your hair. __________ The half-moon gleams like something raw and peeled.

I hear your drums and cowbells from the woods, smell the grass and musk and leaves.

You dance fast on my belly to rouse me. __________ Now we’re belly to belly, flying

low over the city.

The fat on our bodies squeaks as it rubs against the river’s glass; you dip your hand in— out it comes, a glittering fish.

You’ve given me arms and legs to hold you and dance while the world below steams and steeps. __________ Now we’re down on earth, where raindrops scream 12

and die and rise, your fire.

deified when they kiss

On the tip of your finger,

you hold it out to me.

a pearl of semen:

The corpse that’s hung for years from my maple tree coughs, begins to breathe.

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DUMP YOUR BOYFRIEND AND COME WITH ME Maybe every single thing we do is a coping mechanism.

We try to reduce suffering.

It’s all we can do.

Often, it’s enough.

Lawn thawing out.

Grass like matted pubic hair.

It’s all right.

Look at the flowers.

Slice a strawberry.

Crack that window open. Wide. _____ Expose any flesh to me, you know I’ll want to kiss it.

Hecate, whom some think a witch, awaits at every crossroads, a three-headed dog baying and sniffing around her skirts.

We have been both Hecate and the dog.

The road we stand on is packed hard by searchers’ feet.

On our left, a vulture tree.

On our right, a crab apple in magenta bloom. _____

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A tit in my mouth.

Mother’s. Girlfriend’s. Wife’s.

My end is my beginning after all.

Blue jeans. Mutated gene pool.

Sex without appetite.

Up close, gals have moustaches!

How did our parents ever make us?

You tell me that I’m hallucinating.

Then you tell me that I’m hallucinating that you tell me I’m hallucinating.

This relationship could last a lifetime.

15

ALIVE AND BREATHING IN THESSALONIKI Unseen dogs barking, faint smell of diesel, bus keen and whoosh, but lovely white haze over the gulf, the Aegean frosty blue despite the morning warmth.

Pigeons in Aristotle Square, unintelligible letter combos everywhere: ΠΑΝΟΡΑΜΑ Ο Λ Υ Μ Π Ι Ο Ν.

White-and-black gulls swooping, a white-and-black dog walking down below.

Raven squawks, perched on the eave above me.

Marble pillars and ledge on my balcony, marble tile floor, wrought-iron chairs.

Motor scooter like a buzz saw.

Four barges sit in the gulf.

Blue-and-white-striped flag flutters atop the White Tower.

Me? I’m rested and hungry, tuning my eyes and ears for receptivity.

What does this mean? What do I mean by “this”?

I’m alive.

I write because I want to feel alive, want future readers (maybe only me) to know that I have lived.

Electra Palace Hotel, August 7, 2008, 7 a.m.

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17

GREEN I’ll die in life, or live in death, in green: elm leaves, crabgrass, key limes, tornado skies, crisp fives. Its complement? The mortal sheen that slimes my heart’s canals. Sunset. Sunrise.

Last night, we watched the neighbors’ pale-pawed cat, who’d snagged a robin on the backyard lawn.

She ate the head but left the wings and fat bright breast. “Are we alive or dead?”—Your drawn expression showed me you had tried a joke; and my reply, “Is there an open red?” seemed right. —“No, Hon, there’s only Rhine; but poke around.” I grabbed the coldest from the deadwhite cavern of the fridge, caught scent of clean cut basil leaves. The bottle’s label? Green.

18

MIDLIFE My friend looked old beneath my office’s fluorescent lights: his facial creases deep and dark, his posture chin-on-chest, asleep he seemed, an aging, sexless prophetess.

And as we talked, I thought why older men grow beards: to keep from looking like their moms!

At home, tonight, the TV’s mute, but bombs are dropping somewhere anyway. Again.

The whole world’s sad. I’m drinking beer gone flat, with Sonny Rollins on the stereo, my stomach growling like that tenor sax.

A mistress, younger, would she mind my fat exposed? Beyond the sex, where would we go?

Should scruples trust in lust, and just relax?

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WORKHORSE The middling poet trots his dogged way upon the cobbles of a sonnet: unstressed, stressed; then unstressed; stressed. He’s stressed today by nagging thoughts that this is what he’s done with nearly all his leisure time for years.

Iambic acolyte, a metronome his muse, pentameter to count the fears his poems make him face: a horse afoam with sweat would have more sense. And yet, his hidebound drabs do render pleasure when the spark of inspiration’s dim; worn paths can guide lost thoughts, and get them safely home by dark.

Our poet’s reined in tight to no mean fate: a verse that bears with ease his talent’s weight.

20

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LABOR DAY Back-deck umbrella shade bathes the page I sack my soul to seek a sage meet a mage A king’s ransom’s what my waking mind will pay for a peep into that valley cleft fjord Naples Bay of image thought rhythm song lay Three birds fly chirping overhead My beer bottle sweats The air conditioner hums Patience silence Something might be coming ————— Sartre said there are no geniuses only works of genius Summer’s end An orange cat stalks across the backyard grass Why can’t I follow her mewing on my hands and knees 22

Whine of tires on I-94 Harley snarl Porsche snort pass on by leave me blind When I need a poem the most that is when it hides

23

WHITE Arctic polar bears are drowning due to the polar ice cap melting.

—Fortune cookie slip, Anne Savageau’s At the Crossroads

White the drowned polar bear White the ice our gases so obscenely lick White the veils Our stacks and cogs and circuit boards exhale White the cotton that bleeds the land White the treads of silenced tires White the soles detached from human motion White the severed tumbleweed heads White the stars we scarcely see White the bones unsheathed Of blood, of fur, of feather, scale, or flesh White the green frog White the red fox White the gray whale White the violet white the rose white the goldenrod White the brown bear White the purple martin White the silver maple White the yellow jacket White the Agent Orange Lily-white the human liver White the Bluetooth White the lovers’ pink pudenda White the magenta setting sun White our dazed but abiding angel Bruised in the teepee of bones Welted by shredded treads 24

Raped behind the veil Sobbing in the cotton Gorged on fortune cookies Still willing to save us White white white white white white While We wait

25

SMUDGE Line records the present moment.

—Linda Hutchins

Her lines flow and intersect Record the present moment Undulate Roll on and on Says they won’t smudge But he won’t believe her Thinks I could put my thumb On anything And smudge it

__________

During a nap after a swim He watches her sleeping face Kisses the lines that run From the sides of her nose To the corners of her mouth Father’s nose Mother’s mouth If time can’t smudge them How can I

__________

The river current swirls its own double helix He’s thinking while they swim Blood of the earth we’ve dipped ourselves in 26

And what swims in us Some eaten Some drowned Some wrecked on solitary beaches Some in lifeboats so far out The shore’s a thin silver line Unsmudged on the wide horizon

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SILVER SEEKER Accidental nuances create undulations that ripple like water, clouds and rain.

—Linda Hutchins

Silver Silver Silver Silver

spoon silversmith silver maple silverfish bromide silver nitrate medal Silver Surfer silver screen silver anniversary bullet silver lining silver mining silver tongued __________

She’s seeking silver Silver fires in Mother’s hair Silver spires in Father’s beard She’s Isis by the silver Nile Beneath the silver sister moon Seeking slivers of her brother Broken shining to be whole

__________

She’s seeing silver Portland to Detroit Sunglint silver-gilts the Boeing wing God-froth foams below the cargo hold Journey more than nuance Creation more than accident __________

28

She’s living silver Rocks in a boat upon the ocean Yang and yin a silver ripple Rain seeding the womb of the world Her eyes closed She’s closer To God For she’s thrown away Her oar

29

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THIS SONNET IS for Mississippi Fred McDowell, who lived in Tennessee; who plucked his bottleneck with a ring-finger beef-bone pick; who sieved the folklore delta, shuffled the blues deck; who played the jook joints, the Ole Miss frats; who hand-plowed the land till Alan Lomax found him; who drank white lightning; who, hallelujah, laid his burden down; whose yeasty sound— good morning, little schoolgirl; Kokomo me, baby; Jesus is on the mainline; Highway 61; baby, please don’t go— the Stones and Clapton tried to redefine.

The too-late fame and feting took their toll; but, Lord, he did not play no rock ’n’ roll.

31

REREADING A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM Of course, the lovers are in lust, not love.

The forest, fairies, father-figures add a dash of archetypal lore, above, beyond the tug of blood and shadowed, sad, obscenely whiskered id. With donkey-dick, a rube can screw the Fairy Queen and weave a dream that words cannot unknot. And sick of rape and sack, a legend can believe he’s won an Amazon, yet deeply fear what she expects. Sex-hope can couple with chimaeras of the poet and can steer the course of exiled maid or swain of myth.

It doesn’t matter whom each lover weds: before the end, the fairies bless the beds.

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PRAISE FOR WHAT I DON’T KNOW I praise the goldenrod, though it’s a bloom I’d never recognize; the aster, too; and all the herbs and greens I wish I knew: the boneset, cress, and vetch; the witches'-broom, the lady’s slipper, creeping Jenny. Spume and spindrift, krill, Saint Elmo’s fire, the bluegreen algae: sea-unknowns, my praise for you!

The marmoset, the bandicoot, the plume of emu, kiwi, auk; it’s these I praise, and yet know next to nothing of. I laud the campanologist, battologist, quinologist, pomologist, their ways arcane with lore. And, odd, an atheist, I praise the gods forlorn, and even God.

33

HAPPINESS I read this article on happiness: The thesis was that we can never plan it. Carpe diem kneels to flux. Unless we’re lucky, all the schemes that we began last Sunday, say, or in the early spring, or just this minute past, will come to naught because the fickle Fates could spin, then sting us with their scissor-snip or cast our lot.

What’s more, the journey changes us, and what we thought would make us happy then could well cause pain when we arrive at now. My gut reaction is to damn it all to hell.

But heaven beckons me relentlessly.

A paradise? I’ll have to wait and see.

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KEROUAC finger-snappin hipster daddy-o! yow! i find myself in a wake-dream fake-fate soul-scraped state browbeaten, beetle-browed a blueblood bootblack an agnostic agonistes i’m a sobbing hobnobbing psychological bobbinghead doll i endure nirvana nervosa employ a perverse persona i block existential exits i palm a sunflower’s fiefdom of seeds i stir my psyche’s lees i slurp a pure cosmos in the aurora aura in the brown study in the quark-mad muddiness of a brimmed coffee cup 36

wheeeeeeeee! we’re all mere tenants here one sublet from transcendence let’s call it optional profundity

ahem

amen omen? oh, man!

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JUST ONE OF US Window Door in the daytime Mirror at night In the day he can escape to trees grass car arbor vitae shade noncommittal sky doesn’t have to see himself But the night makes him and probably you and you and you and you and you afraid of what there is to see Right now he’s shirtless and drunk again writing Wife’s in bed Red wine’s in a black glass His sexual fantasies are really pretty pedestrian Friend write your own here in three lines or less ______________________________________ ______________________________________ ______________________________________ Feel better?

For Christ’s sake!

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He taught Shakespeare for three hours tonight with his fly unzipped!

He sees nothing beyond and too much of himself But he’s trying hard to think of for you Dear Reader Ghostly Double Luckless Guest

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MEMORY PRESENT Stubble-bearded muddle-headed here he begins again Leonard Cohen Mose Allison on the stereo It’s been months since he’s seen her legs The last time it was Pietá all over again The woman takes a broken man makes him whole again Red wine in a black glass Barking late-night Chocolate Lab Ecstasy and tears Unfamiliar sheets No photos Nothing public Only part of a poem She’s a minority He’s white and male and conspicuously free Something (maybe the TV) tells him he should be sorry for the present as well as the memory 40

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AMERICANS IN OXFORD Our accents surely give away our roots.

In pub or hotel restaurant, our speech, our clothes, our shoes, our skin, our builds must reach the eyes of natives here, like hobnailed boots identify a country rube in books

by Dickens, Hardy, Eliot. We love the local ales, the cozy tavern nooks, the parks, the cobblestones, the clouds above that break to free the “English sun,” a sun our concierge suggested might not warm our foreign bones. But these are cousins here: we share a language and a culture dear to us. Despite the world’s sore ills that storm and howl like Lear divided, we are one.

The Old Parsonage, September 11, 2008

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GREEN MAN IN THE APENNINES The Apennines just north of Florence hug their pines, he thinks, like sons about to go to senseless war. Packed tourist buses chug from peak of green to peak of green, and though his thoughts are low, his rising lust peaks green, a pagan god’s. He eyes the women on his bus: they’re not the best he’s ever seen, but with one mirrored glance, his heart is gone.

Near-fifty fool! This way lies madness, sure!

Remember works of art you’ve seen: they scream “Alive! Yes, I’m alive!” but murmur pure devotion, too: to duty, not just dream.

Besides, right here’s your wife. And what’s ahead?

Good wine, a clean Venetian hotel bed.

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DIONYSUS AND APOLLO King George Palace Hotel, Athens

Apollo on the Delphi mountainside, inhaling prayers, and Dionysus drunk at Epidaurus, where the smallest chunk of tragedy’s so pure that kings have cried at excess. I’m hung over, writing verse, a hymn to clouds and sun that paint the sea.

(In truth, it’s just my journal: poetry might thunder from it or, like smoke, disperse.)

It’s breakfast on the roof; the city roasts like Nescafé; the Parthenon’s afloat in haze. Last night we drank those ouzo toasts and then made love. Today, in hills remote, we’ll visit Agamemnon’s tomb, the ghosts of orgy and restraint, the slain scapegoat.

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SOCRATES SANDALS For Pantelis Melissinos

I bought a pair of sandals yesterday.

The maker was a poet, too. We swapped each other’s books; I told him where I’d stopped along my mainland tour. I’d come to say that poetry unites the world, but said instead, “I’ve brought a gift.” I realize now the two are much the same, remember how the sandalmaker’s eyes lit up, the red that warmed his tongue. I chose a simple pair called “Socrates” and got the custom fit: My naked foot was trapped, an arctic hare, in leather strong enough to mangle it.

The maker laughed, then shaped his art: To wear these is to walk the path of truth and wit.

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METEORA The god in red, the girl in blue, and you: the symbolism Byzantine as if you’re painted icons dancing on a cliff that lifts these ancient monasteries to a clearer view of heaven. Life is bright in high Thessalian light: the mangy cur that chases tourist buses smells of myrrh and licks his fur to purer gold; the frightful shelves of skulls throw glow like gaslit glass; and you, in contemplation fierce enough to wake the god and girl like April grass— a trinity, a mystery, such stuff that creeds are made of. Let our deaths amass: they can’t withstand true art’s, pure faith’s rebuff.

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NOTES Front cover: Detail of a statue of Atlas, Bodnant Garden, Wales, August 2006.

Photograph by the author.

Page 4: Palm-reader machine near the Corinth Canal, August 2008. Photograph by the author.

Page 5: “Don’t comb you hair”: See Bly’s poem “Thinking of Tu Fu’s Poem.” “Get torn to pieces”: See Bly’s “Kneeling Down to Look into a Culvert.” “You’ll be sentenced to a thousand years of joy”: See Bly’s “Stealing Sugar from the Castle.”

Page 6: “The girl with fish for hair”: See the penultimate chapter of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. “His eyes turned pearls”: See Ariel’s song “Full fathom five” in The Tempest, 1.2.

Page 8: Poem in response to At the Junction: Industrial Design, an exhibition at Washtenaw Community College’s Gallery One, March 2009. “Woods so lovely, dark, and deep”: See Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Page 9: Outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City, March 2009. Photograph by the author.

Page 11: “Soul . . . clap hands, and sing:” See Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Page 16: The Greek letters spell “PANORAMA” and “OLYMPIAN.” Page 17: A building in Veria, Greece, August 2008. Photograph by the author.

Page 21: Navy Pier, Chicago, Halloween 2009. Photograph by the author.

Pages 24-25: Poem in response to Anne Savageau’s At the Crossroads exhibition at Gallery One, 2007. Some of the objects mentioned in the poem were part of the exhibition, whose dominant motif (it seemed to me) was a dead whiteness.

Pages 26-29: Poems in response to Linda Hutchins’s Lineal Silver exhibition at Gallery One, 2007. Hutchins created her art by scraping a silver spoon (inherited from her mother? grandmother?) on a white-painted wall.

Page 30: A shop in the Plaka, Athens, August 2008. Photograph by the author.

Page 31: Some information is borrowed from Pete Welding’s liner notes for the CD reissue of McDowell’s I Do Not Play No Rock ’n’ Roll (Capitol, 1995).

Page 35: Wall outside what purports to be Juliet’s house, Verona, August 2007.

Photograph by the author.

Page 39: The final three lines echo the final line of Baudelaire’s “To the Reader”: “—You know him, reader,—hypocrite,—my twin!” (Trans. Norman R. Shapiro).

Page 41: One of the monasteries at Meteora, Greece, August 2008. Photograph by the author.

Page 42: The Old Parsonage is a hotel in Oxford.

Page 45: Pantelis Melissinos, a writer, artist, and sandalmaker, is the son of Stavros Melissinos, the famous poet-sandalmaker of Athens.

Page 46: “Such stuff that creeds are made of”: See Prospero’s great speech in The Tempest, 4.1.

Back cover: Photograph of the author by Ann Zimmerman.

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NIGHTSYOURWIFEISGONETHEGIRLWIT HFISHFORHAIRTHEOCEANSOFOURM OTHERSREDESIGNTOSEEYOURLOVETO NIGHTRAINANGELDUMPYOURBOYFRI ENDANDCOMEWITHMEALIVEANDBRE ATHINGINTHESSALONIKIGREENMIDLI FEWORKHORSELABORDAYWHITESMU DGESILVERSEEKERTHISSONNETISREREA DINGAMIDSUMMERNIGHT’SDREAMPR AISEFORWHATIDON’TKNOWHAPPINE SSKEROUACJUSTONEOFUSMEMORYPR ESENTAMERICANSINOXFORDGREENM ANINTHEAPENNINESDIONYSUSANDA POLLOSOCRATESSANDALSMETEORA Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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