ZACK ANDERSON

NATURE POEM

A nature poem walked out of the swamp and shot me in the head. We were making a film, we colorized it with diesel rainbows. Emulsifier silvered the edges of the nature poem. I played a docile corpse among the sandbags in the nature poem’s pickup. Synth riffs tracked us along power lines toward the bayou. The nature poem killed the headlights on the dam road. After I hit the water its surface healed silver like the skin of the film.

NATURE POEM

I was posed in a compromising position, in a diorama in the museum of the anthropocene. My skin stretched on the wires and fiberglass burned inside the armature. Kids were drooling on the guardrail and I had my ear to the membrane. I could hear the voice of the nature poem on the audio tour, pointing out implements of my degeneracy. From this angle glossy garlands gave the impression of autoerotic asphyxiation. At the end of the tour the nature poem flipped the switch, lit me up like a pure surface.

NATURE POEM

I sat with my antagonist under a noose of wisteria with a patio table like an enormous lens between us. I heard a data leak under the bushes and the nature poem coughed some blood on the glass. The nature poem drew inscrutable diagrams with the blood and some pollen and called it writing. When we weren’t confined to our houses we were burning christmas trees on the lawn. The little squirrels’ heads rotated like automata. It was the middle of a hatch event, silkworms dropped from the trees like the special ops. Let me be remembered at a distance or not at all, said the nature poem from under the glass.

Zack Anderson is from Cheyenne, Wyoming. He holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD student at the University of Georgia. His book reviews appear in American Microreviews and Interviews, Harvard Review, and Kenyon Review. His poems have recently been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Delta Review, Echoverse, and grama.