Two Poems by Carolyn Zaikowski

Summons

Where do they go after the storm
Where do they go after the tide
Where do they go after they’re lost
Where do they go after the sprawl

Where do they go when there’s no bridge
Where do they go when there’s no bride
Where do they go when there’s no station
Where do they go when there’s a mountain

Where do they go instead of a home
Where do they go instead of the ground
Where do they sit if not at the table
Where do they go instead of alone

Where do they go because of the thunder
Where do they go because of the calm
Where do they go because of who let them
Where do they go because of an inkling

Where do they go without your lone aspect
Where do they go without your wire cage
Where do they go without a cold sonnet
Where do they go without their own time

Where do they go before they’re asunder
Where do they go before they’re too loud
Where do they go before they’re unsettling
Where do they go before it is time

Directions

To the left there’s a wanting
To the right there’s a needing
and you’ll find yourself arrested by the pull

Your object will go running
towards the part of you that’s something
and your forward-facing wave will lose its crown

Don’t despair if music’s over
Don’t despair if sounds are weapons
Turn inside yourself to birth new chords

At the end of birds, there’s nothing,
so don’t complicate things that way
Swim away if you can’t figure out the code

By the final tides, a blessing
in the name of those who’ve left us,
then eternity gets filtered through a cave

Carolyn Zaikowski is the author of the novels In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in Denver Quarterly, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, Entropy, Everyday Feminism, PANK, Dusie, and elsewhere. She can be found at carolynzaikowski.com.

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