Two Poems by Zach Savich

For All We Know

For all we know, all it takes nothing to endure
is all that will endure. I write you from the afterlife.

Behind my eyes are the long stones that keep
a field unplanted, so the fertile top’s pristine.

I say pleasure.
I say escalate.

Knowing little but faithful to the little green even dew sets off.
I keep a mirror in one palm to read the other.

 

The Most Again

Real astonishment not the error

cicadas mistaken

for the chir of coming bikes

and we moved aside but the distance

error is the initial

understanding of In months we’ll throw

rocks to break the ice just wide enough

to set one bottle in

and wait for spring I love imagining

the well-dressed woman who spends her days

in the tapered light

beneath the overpass unstoppering

a bottle opaque from steam released

by the tempered wood peering within

to find not a message but

a minute ship inside

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About the Author:

Zach Savich is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Firestorm, which won the 2010 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Competition, and a collection of prose, Events Film Cannot Withstand. His latest poetry collection, Century-Swept Brutal, is forthcoming from Black Ocean Press. Savich currently teaches at Shippensburg University and serves as an editor with The Kenyon Review.