in parentheses

Thomas Sims holds a B.S. in Biology from the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University. He currently teaches sixth grade science and eleventh grade philosophy/literature in Chandler, Arizona. His work has been featured in Beyond Words and An Unexpected Journal.

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A Salon in St. Petersburg, 1848

Cold cobblestones catch dripping rain from dilapidated rooftops
and you, you stop, transfixed and transfigured by the light
emanating from a gaudy salon window. A shaggy mop
of hair leaking down your face. Tight
hunger strangles a stomach that’s never
not known want.

Two wide globes take in all the rosé filtered lighting,
entire worlds nestled firmly in an adolescent skull,
gazing at satiety on promenade. And I, fighting
to avoid your glance, intensely focus on the dull
conversation billowing out past my hand
of cards.

If there were malice in your sunken eyes, some accusation of
guilt towards our separate worlds, then perhaps I’d not be haunted by
your visage. But all I see is parched and strangled love
painted in your soaked and shivering face, separated from me by
nothing more than money and a pane
of frosted glass.

Champagne flows, the night goes on, and still you linger there,
unnoticed and unphased. Bored out of my mind, your troubles
occupy my whole attention, and then that tattered head of hair
departs, and I’ve lost, and all that I see now is the 35 roubles
I must pay. However, it matters not. I was
never any good at
bridge.

A Wedding in England, 1948

There’s a shadow somewhere in that back corner of the room:
lurking, looming, and existing liminally. Dialogues bandy back
and forth across the reception, all is bridal groomed
perfection, except that single corner full of light’s
lack.

Couplets in the afternoon. It was raining on that mid-May morning,
when the lilacs postured gently in their beds, seductive in their poses
but nuanced and at ease. And, despite the downpour, flies were swarming
round a hand that had written love notes to you, sealed and tucked in roses,
placed gently at your door and left to carry a vulgar rifle
to some awful war that
takes no notice of the spring.

Remember the fireside, that night before he met your wandering eyes.
Shadows dance with fireflies around the sparks and smoke,
and every breath and joke and burning marshmallow plies
together into one tight knot of youthful joy. Every subtle stroke
of your memory’s fine brush paints watercolors with your
tears, as you weep for that little girl who didn’t know
what love is.

Whitewashed wood in rows, bluebell bunches placed on years old mound,
how much the war did take from you. It was raining then,
it always was so beautiful in France this time of year. You’d found
that you could love the rain. And grief and pain grew out
of you like splinters.

Stanzas, seranades in the evening air. Each bouquet blooms out
vibrantly against your wandering mind. You never thought
you’d invite that shadow to your wedding, but now,
you see him truly as he was, not some man who fought
and died, with foolish pride, and broke your tender heart,
but the shy wisp of a boy who met your gaze with unabashed
joy at one young summer’s gentle start, and for that…

Yes for that,
you’re glad he came to say
goodbye.

Calliope

The calendar’s torn pages beckon brokenly to me,
gently frayed, and still she sits mutely, statuesque and
numb, like Michaelangelo’s David, unabashadly naked
with nothing left to the imagination, strangled
by a mass of ungrateful petty tourists.

She is myriads, all and none and something all at once,
and I’m some Argos, lying in filth and loyally awaiting her return.
I’ve learned that all I truly want is rest: sensation silenced,
kind and beautiful cessation,
void.
Not death, but something like it,
something that she always used to freely give
to me.

The ocean warmly sits, spreading like an empty page,
and I float upon my back upon its fearsome depths.
Utter darkness supports my weight,
concealing an absolute abyss of what might be.
Seasons wax and wane while I remain:
a piece of the horizon for some
fisherman on the shore.

And finally, I hear it there within it all,
the freezing moisture on her breath when all the world is frore,
a bead of sweat upon her brow in fields of rippling warmth,
and that subtle remnant of the fine bouquet in a bottle of merlot
she still keeps on her window sill, despite the sweetly painful memories
that aroma always brings.
It’s the mingling of grief and joy that brings all to fine completion,
and there it ends,
as every single poem must end in

silence.

Until the Morning

A nightmare:
blades flash swiftly in the dark black night,
and shadows creep round the vessel of a man who
once held Rome within his overgrasping palm. Right
and wrong war on within you
Brutus.

You all did love him once, and not without cost.
And as Polaris rests, zenith fixed, one notion clings
ever to my mind, a desperate sailor lost
at sea clutching
fastly to his sunk ship’s stormtossed prow:
“There’s no way I was born for
this.”

I wake:
the middle of dead night, when tyrannical heat
banishes me to my half of our bed,
I worry that I’ve become an intellectual Frankenstein, some incomplete
attempt to synthesize everything I’ve ever read,
and wonder if there’s anything that’s solely
me inside my tossed and troubled

Mind—more like a scene
from a Flannery O’Connor short story
than an ordered whole. A battle field of thoughts, gorey
and dismembered, forgotten in the sheen
of some misfit’s muzzle flash, straw hat
shading all the fire in his

Eyes—I know them as surely as I’ve studied the anatomy of literature—
iris bends, ciliary muscles stretch and photons dance along the retina;
all to let me read her face: the place where all the science burns
up into crumbling ash and drifts away. I forget
myself
in this darkness. Vision and memory’s kind embrace recede and
she turns over in her sleep, like Orpheus grasping for the light,
her hand finds mine and gently leads me home

she’s never needed sight
to see
me

The Looking Glass (Too Early)

Overtly, on the path of autumn, I felt the first
foot fall and fade. Thirst made all my efforts
languish on the layman’s path. All my anguish burst
out stark upon the dying summer’s strained contortions,
death thrown dirges for fireworks and good iced cream.

Dream: street corner in the darkest night,
evangelists shouting propagandized light,
battering my tired ears. It’s a pict-
ure of some newly baptized baby stick-
ing out of a dusty preowned copy of the Illiad.
I’ve often tried to love that total stranger,
who’s always looked so happy nestled in
among the pages
of the Trojan
war.

And—
I am me, and I am not me.
My picture’s on the page, and foot is walking freely
down autumnal path. Before the end
I very well may shout hell from the sidewalk’s bend,
and judge and nudge, or rather budge on all
I’ve ever held concrete and true.

But—
like infant on the wrinkled page,
Past passion’s pyres and rampant rage,
I’d always planned to be a man,
and make it back to
You.

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