z a c h a r y s c h o m b u r g

z a c h a r y s c h o m b u r g
	The Fire Cycle Sin and Forgiveness The Ghost Age I Found Your Beating Heart Half-Buried

The Fire Cycle
	There are trees and they are on fire. There are hummingbirds and they are on fire. There are graves and they are on fire and the things coming out of the graves are on fire. The house you grew up in is on fire. There is a gigantic trebuchet on fire on the edge of a crater and the crater is on fire. There is a complex system of tunnels deep underneath the surface with only one entrance and one exit and the entire system is filled with fire. There is a wooden cage we’re trapped in, too large to see, and it is on fire. There are jaguars on fire. Wolves. Spiders. Wolf-spiders on fire. If there were people. If our fathers were alive. If I could find our daughter. Fire to the edges. Fire in the river beds. Fire between the mattresses of the bed you were born in. Fire in your mother’s belly. There is a little boy wearing a fire shirt holding a baby lamb. There is a little girl in a fire skirt asking if she can ride the baby lamb like a horse. There is you on top of me with thighs of fire while a hot red fog hovers in your hair. There is me on top of you wearing a fire shirt and then pulling the fire shirt over my head and tossing it like a fireball through the fog at a new kind of dinosaur. There are meteorites disintegrating in the atmosphere just a few thousand feet above us and tiny fireballs are falling down around us, pooling around us, forming a kind of fire lake which then forms a kind of fire cloud. There is this feeling I get when I am with you. There is our house burning like a star on the hill. There is our dark flickering shadow. There is my hand on fire in your hand on fire, my body on fire above your body on fire. There are tongues of ash. There are rocks on a private and distant uninhabitable planet. There is our whole life ahead of us.
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Sin and Forgiveness
	I am alone on a parade float. My parade float is the only parade float in the parade. When my mouth opens to ask forgiveness a little girl crawls out. She crawls into a house in the woods and grows up in its warm brownish light. All of the people in the world come from my mouth and grow up on the side of the woods where sins are forgiven. Sin and Forgiveness is a perfect system. The Water Cycle is another example. The Water Cycle is perfect.
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	The Ghost Age
	When I set the table I set the table for one. There is no table. I spread a white bed sheet across it and place the dishes. There is no bed sheet. There are no dishes. Though when I sit in the chair I am sitting in the room in a chair. These are the years known as The Chair Age. By the time the chair rots from beneath me I have carved a set of beautiful dishes. When I set the table the dishes crash to the floor at my feet where I stand. These are the years known as The Dishes Age During The Sheet Age a white bed sheet seems to take the shape on the table but only for a moment then floats slowly down to where the broken dishes always were. This is the same sheet you will later pick up in another age, cut two tiny holes into, and become something you already are.
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	I Found Your Beating Heart Half-Buried
	I found your beating heart half-buried in the woods and when I picked it up I found your body around that heart, warm and with arms tight around me. I tried to show you the way home and warn you about predators but I had no words because I had no larynx and I didn’t even have a thorax. I didn’t have anything. And after a long time, you learned to walk
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ZACHARY SCHOMBURG is the author of a book of poems, The Man Suit (Black Ocean Press, 2007), the co-editor of Octopus, the co-editor of Octopus Books, the co-curator of the The Clean Part Reading Series, and a PhD student at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He is currently working on a second book of poems as well as translations of the Russian-language poet, Gennadii Aigi.