Ars Poetica at Wegmans

POETRY

by Steph Sundermann-Zinger

You know how it is. You go in hopeful,
focused, needing only the things
you’ve written down—a short list you lose
before you’ve passed the cucumbers,
dropped in the hot honey fog
of the cantaloupe crate as you push
into the green—bunched lettuces, beans,
arterial flash of radish, blunt seduction
of late summer strawberries softening toward jam—
a box of those, surely, and some cauliflower
for ballast, shrink-wrapped brain so pale
it is an absence of color. In the meat aisle,
ribeyes are quietly bleeding, seamed
with fat. Stay with me, now—you grab a flat
of steaks, wet red, dodge the baleful gaze
of the lobsters, their insect faces alive
with inexpressible rage. Thus burdened, you move
into the bakery, everything yeasty, rising,
finished loaves crusted over gold, the hunger in you
growing. A round of sourdough, yes,
and a wedge of yellow cake, iced white
and flecked with pink confetti, calling up
your seventh birthday party, held on the banks
of a brownish blear of pond, fuchsia balloons
tugging at the edges of your mother’s
picnic blanket. The afternoon you caught
a silver dart of minnow in the cup
of your small hands and watched it flicker,
let it go again. You contemplate a blister pack
of candles, craving their gentle ritual
—the breath, the wish—and on
into the dairy case, where countless rows
of eggs drowse in their cardboard nests.
You leave with a full bag smelling
of August sun. Truly, anything could happen.

Poem Beginning with a Forecast

POETRY

by Steph Sundermann-Zinger

Tomorrow, it’s going to be a hundred degrees
below zero. I ask my father to repeat himself,

assuming he’s confused. Recently, he’s grown
very old—dentures and a metal cane,

bought at the same pharmacy where he picks up
cheap reading glasses with rickety frames—

in the kitchen, an Altoid tin of tiny screws. Already,
he’s told me twice about that night’s dinner

at the Portuguese restaurant,
holding chouriço in his mouth like the name

of a beautiful woman. We chat, I check the weather.
Tomorrow, a New Hampshire mountain’s peak

will freeze to rival Mars—a fairy-tale forecast,
ridiculous. The mountain is 200 miles away, but I

don’t mention that; instead, I tell him (as he once
told me) to wear a hat, to keep the thermostat

at 68 degrees. The pipes, I chide him
when he hesitates. The weather’s changing, Dad—

I want you to be safe. I hear the news
click on, know he’s gauging the cold front

with the same puckered squint he used
on my fourth grade division worksheets, musing,

tongue in teeth. I’ve never been good
at making things smaller, letting them

go. A hundred below, he says again, reverent,
Hansel at the sugar house’s gumdropped door,

where one minus a hundred equals something
astronomical, the secret equation for interstellar

life, a galactic parable of candy and stars
scribbled on the back of a mimeograph,

a map to some frozen hill
where we might linger

On Planting a Garden While My Father Loses His Memory

POETRY

by Steph Sundermann-Zinger

Bring back the garden of my eleventh summer—
the one you dusted with Carbaryl until grubs
bubbled from the soil, gut-white
and gasping. You planted hibiscus
between their coiled bodies, careless
with your steps, sneakers smearing
thick milk paste onto the lawn—a kind of mercy,
you said when I protested. The flowers
grew, like everything you put into the dirt—
frill of marigolds along the front walk,
pink victrolas of the petunia blooms we’d pinch
and toss away. That was the year
I learned about perennials, watching
the hibiscus plants close like umbrellas,
then unfold again, bright canopy
over a thousand unmarked graves.
This is what I know now, wrist-deep
in the living earth, pulling out roots—the ground
has more claim to you than I do. Still,
we don’t say dying,
but forgetting, as if we could grow you back
from last year’s seeds. I search
our old address in Google Earth, find
a stranger’s home, crepe myrtle grown wild
as a Halloween fright wig, wisteria
burying the bricks. I look for your hibiscus,
but the angle is wrong, or the plants
are gone, I don’t know which. It’s unsettling,
to see the doors and windows of my childhood
in their expected places, the rooms behind
a mystery. I imagine the kitchen,
maple cabinets with brass knobs, or maybe
silver, the bathroom a sketch in my memory,
toilet and sink. The living room,
matted patch of carpet near the entryway
where I once dripped a glossy pea
of clear nail polish, then panicked,
ground it in. Maybe our dark moments
are the last to leave us. In my mind, old curtains
shift between shades of green
like breeze-blown grass, their true color lost.