APRIL SNOW
by Matthew Zapruder
Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world
is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep
their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred
waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle
when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows
the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings.
I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various
faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t
want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep
I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces
of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings.
I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.
SOURCE: “April Snow” appears in Matthew Zapruder’s collection Come on All You Ghosts. (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), available at Amazon.com.
IMAGE: “Snowflakes and Sakura Blossoms,” available free at this link.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Matthew Zapruder is the author of several collections of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts (2010), The Pajamaist (2006), and American Linden (2002). With Brian Henry, Zapruder co-founded Verse Press, which later became Wave Books. As an editor for Wave Books, Zapruder co-edited, with Joshua Beckman, the political poetry anthology State of the Union: 50 Political Poems (2008). His own poems have been included in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2009), Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll (2007), and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006), as well as Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook (2010). Zapruder’s honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2008 May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at the New School; the University of California Riverside, Palm Desert; and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He lives in San Francisco, where he is also a guitarist in the rock band The Figments.
Silver Birch Press 