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Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits

tonight I'm cleaning baby portobellos
for you, my young activist

wiping the dirty tops with a damp cloth
as carefully as I used to rinse raspberries

for you to adorn your fingertips
before eating each blood-red prize

these days you rarely look me in the eye
& your long shagged hair hides your smile

I don’t expect you to remember or
understand the many ways I’ve kept you

alive or the life my love for you
has made me live

Rachel Zucker's poetry collections include The Pedestrians (Wave Books, 2014), Museum of Accidents (Wave Books, 2009), and The Bad Wife Handbook (Wesleyan University Press, 2007).

Occasion

Themes

About this Poem

“I wrote this poem for and about my oldest son when he was about nine years old and had decided to become a pescetarian after reading a book about the meatpacking industry. My son is now about to turn eighteen and will leave for college this summer. We are still dancing the beautiful, painful dance of mother-child separation and attachment, different steps, different haircuts, same love.”
—Rachel Zucker

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There Are Two Magics

he said describing the fantasy novel he was reading 
as they walked the drizzled streets she was listening 
& laughing & realized she’d been walking through one city 
or another next to this man for more than twenty years 
longer of course than their kids were old 
their smart alecky sons who hadn’t yet met the person 
with whom they might walk through rain discussing 
ridiculous books with great sincerity & pleasure             
Seriously he said I can’t stop reading it but when they went upstairs 
to the good bed in the good

Rachel Zucker

2018

real poem (personal statement)

I skim sadness like fat off the surface
of cooling soup. Don't care about
metaphor but wish it would arrive
me. There’s a cool current of air
this hot day I want to ride.
I have no lover, not even my love.
I have no other, not even I.

Rachel Zucker

2014

I’d Like a Little Flashlight

*/ /*-->*/

and I’d like to get naked and into bed and be hot radiating heat from the inside these sweaters and fleeceys do nothing to keep out the out or keep my vitals in—some drafty body I’ve got leaking in and out in all directions I’d like to get naked into bed but hot on this early winter afternoon already dusky grim and not think of all the ways I’ve gone about the world and shown myself a fool, shame poking holes in my thinned carapace practically lacy and wo

Rachel Zucker

2011

Poems

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Hours Days Years Unmoor Their Orbits

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