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Ode to My Therapist’s Floral Rug By Nicole Zuckerman Beneath the florescent thrum of conversation beneath every sole, heel, and rounded boot beneath pivotal hearts you, golden summer floral buffer woolen garden, lie patterned between chair and couch the tread of your petals almost sweet I pass over you our weekly dance an awkward shuffle my feet a jumble of politeness above you the story of my life dredged of all metaphor begins again rooted to the floor, the room, the hour you listen radial, calm, captive words cinching round and round catch, unravel, tangle above you faces open and close like bridges
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and you, floral buffer woolen garden knotted in pastels narrate the silences that fall in-between shifting and tidal the telling, sloping the heart hanging lower Nicole Zuckerman: I am an ESL teacher in Pennsylvania always looking for new ways to challenge students to view language as a unique form of self expression. I am an avid collector of poetry, as well as aspiring to be a poet worthy of those whom I collect. I love flea markets and auctions and I seek out ephemera because I see beauty in that which defines our daily lives.
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can park my car?” “No. But I can show you where to park without getting a ticket. I don’t have a car, myself.” “How do you get groceries and shit?” She thought he laughed. “Looks like I beg my daughter to take me. We’ll call it rent.” “Call it even,” she said. Her words spooked her. He raised his glass. “Cheers, then.” She leaned close. “I don’t drink, Seth.” So he drank hers, too. “Come on, I want to show you something. If I can find it.” He called directions from where he had jotted them on the back of an envelope, up 76 to Bala Cynwyd. He ejected the disk she had in the dash player, Rainer Maria, and put in Skip James. She wanted to turn it down when she heard the barrage of pops and crackles, but she did not. He told her how, in the twenties and thirties, the record company sent the musicians north on trains to Wisconsin, and how they recorded almost as if in secret, blacks in a white town, so much of the north inhospitable to the great migration, before they were turned instantly around with a little cash in pocket and shipped back to Mississippi to await the modest release. Then the Depression. Libby pulled the car through the gate at the corner and set the parking brake on the hill. They walked between the memorials in the lumpy lots. He told her they were looking for Skip James’s stone. “The guy we were just listening to? It’s funny how English teachers are always into the blues.” “What do you mean funny?” “Like, grammatically. To show they’re not uptight assholes.” She glanced at him to see if he had the hard look again. “Somebody else pointed it out to me. But it still kind of backfires, because only pretentious white guys-“ “Oh come on, Libby. Whom do you
