by Lisa Zimmerman

After a photograph by Julie Adams


My neighbor says whenever she’s sad she sits down
with a cup of tea and writes a list of fifty things
she loves, you know, like chocolate chip cookies,
the fresh warmth of laundry spilled from the dryer,
the crescent moon held between tree branches.
I’m remembering this with my arms full of wet towels,
the petition to stop fracking in the far pasture
denied, my heart busted by that and other losses
with their many sharp points. I didn’t know I loved so much
of this vanishing world—early spring breeze rattling cattails
along the pond, bright sword of sunlight on mountain snow,
a toddler singing in the shopping cart, the boy who holds the door
open for me, the car that waits, the promised rain that comes—
and you, daughter, years before the fire that took the barn,
before the divorce, before you moved to the city
for work. I see you ambling home on your chestnut gelding,
your long hair and his long tail, swinging
the lasso as if you could capture the setting sun,
to keep a perfect day from disappearing, to hold it
like a flame inside your heart for the dark days to come.

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Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, Cultural Daily, and many other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology.

by Lisa Zimmerman

The sales pitch was to tell you
astronauts drank me in outer space.
It’s true. John Glenn and I did
have a fling on his 1962 Mercury flight
and that made me popular, for a little while.
Only because you thought NASA invented me.
But no, I was always just my sweet powdery self
until someone mixed me with water
and stirred me. John Glenn never

loved me. The way some men don’t
really love the women they drink up
and put back on a shelf afterwards.

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Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award winner), The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press), and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Cave Wall, Hole in the Head Review, and other journals. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize anthology, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology.

by Lisa Zimmerman

There is a murmur of faraway rain and we are

small in sleep’s corner, breath of the dog

dreaming a field and running—

there is time in a tin cup turned over

while all across the world’s steady body

souls press toward any window of release

any open door, any open, oh—



let’s not open our eyes right now, let’s wander

down the tunnel sleep carved from our breathing

break into sunlight warm as a hand

on someone’s forehead, song after song

of the untouched departed, how they keep ahead of us flying—

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Lisa Zimmerman’s writing has appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Poet Lore, Amethyst Review, SWWIM Every Day, and other journals. Her first book won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Others include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She lives in Colorado.

By Lisa Zimmerman

By then she was pretty much always drunk by the time I got home from school and the mall was too far by bike but Woolworth’s was close so my best friend Dina Peters and I rode our three-speeds to the Circle K first and bought a pack of Kool Menthols and smoked one out front getting lightheaded as workmen descended from their huffing pickups and eyed us before stepping inside the sealed cool interior. It was hot for April and we both wore tube tops and cut-off shorts, neither one of us had much of a bosom though my long blond hair always got a wayward glance and I’m not sure now if I bought black fishnets that day or just borrowed Dina’s, probably a hand-me-down from her older sister who had real cleavage and a boyfriend with a wolf tattoo who drove a beat-up red Camaro and never looked twice at Dina or me.

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Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry and short stories have appeared in Redbook, The Sun, Florida Review, Poet Lore, Chiron Review, Trampset, Amethyst Review, SWWIM Every Day, and other journals. Her first poetry collection won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Other collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize. Lisa is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

by Lisa Zimmerman

 In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God                                                  Saint John of the Cross

Your father married for love
an orphan below his noble station.
Discarded by his wealthy kindred
they say your parents nurtured you in poverty—
and the bread was as sweet as any bread

and the days offered their shiny hands
and their little streams of water
singing in the glades.

I see you wandering happily as a boy,
the sun a crown on your small head,
your bare feet scuffing the dust.
God chirped like a wood lark
in the throat of afternoon
and the lonely months in prison
were far ahead beneath the great shadow
of the future.

I try to follow you there, O mystic,
to watch you defy your greedy brethren
monks who will reject your reforms, your love
of less, of days returned to prayer and fasting.

Fat and threatened, they silenced you
in a narrow stone cell, one tiny window
like the one in the soul where day after day
the voice of God pierced your suffering.

Out of emptiness, a full heart—
out of abandonment, a poem of seeking—
out of utter darkness, a gleam of pure light—
love’s last trembling boat waiting for you
to get in, and row.

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Lisa Zimmerman’s poems have appeared in Cave Wall, Colorado Review, Natural Bridge, Apple Valley Review, Chiron Review, Trampset, and other magazines.  She has published three chapbooks and three full length collections. Her debut poetry collection won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Her other collections include The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.   

by Lisa Zimmerman

The study in blue and white is the kitchen window

with its winter history, bottles on the sill holding

a steady cordial of January’s thin light—

clean, cold, undrinkable. Whereas summer

remains unthinkable, so future I could build a church

around it, be saved again by the virgin’s blue gown,

its cascade down to her naked feet, stained

glass windows a brilliant fracture of gold, black,

red for blood, and other passions.

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Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Florida Review, Poet Lore, Cave Wall, and other journals and anthologies. Her first book won the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. Her most recent collections are The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and The Hours I Keep (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. She’s a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Northern Colorado.