Tag: Michael Simms

Two Poems by Michael Simms

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The Dark Undercarriage of the Purple Packard

If I were to pray for my father
it wouldn’t be for him exactly
but for the shadow beneath
the purple Packard where
he crawled when I was six.
I followed him into the darkness
of machinery, a mystery
men love though he in particular
knew nothing about what drives
things forward, power
carried from the engine to
the strange wheels and wires
of this life. Men love certainty,
rules and laws that determine
how things work, but the stories
we live by end too quickly
with a moral almost always
wrong. He wanted me to be
the man men pretend to be,
a lion of fire, the man men
imagine their leaders to be.
The voice that held my father
was his father’s, a burly man
who wrestled in high school,
worked on derricks and settled
in a career as a statistician
for Illinois Power and Light.
A lost photograph comes to mind
of three men in gray suits and
fedoras walking toward the lens
believing they owned the world
because they kind of did.
Before smoking himself to death,
he gave his son a 1949 purple Packard
fading to gray. My father and I lay
on the driveway of the very house
I remember in the shadow
of the memory of his father
whose son pointed at the dark
undercarriage, explaining
things he knew nothing about

* 

Rippling Waves of Heat over the Wheat Fields of Kansas

Somewhere north of Kansas City,
my father disappeared in himself
as he often did
then returned and noticed the blacktop rolling through
the roiling center of America which he loved
with unquestioning ardor. In the long journey away
from my father, I’ve often remembered
the way he drove in a trance
and suddenly woke
surprised to be in his life, and I promised myself
to be here, wherever here is

We were passing through a dead zone
where Jack Brickhouse, the Voice of the Chicago Cubs,
was telling my dad the pain he feels at his mother abandoning him
is alright because he’s about to steal second

An Oldsmobile like ours, driven by
a middle-aged white man, passed us
his wife beside him, eyes wide in terror.
Dad stepped on the gas and we flew down the road, passing them,
so the other man stepped on the gas passing us,
his wife yelling at him to slow down. And my father
going over a hundred miles an hour roared past them
again. Dad smiled. He’d won. I turned to watch
the Oldsmobile shrinking in the distance

Then, as we drove through the dry shadow of a cloud
Dad wiped the sweat from his face
and pointed at a large burial mound ahead of us
beautiful in the piercing light

He was delivering me to a life he disapproved of.
He expected gratitude
but I was the son who aspired to be a poet
and kindness from this rough man was like a stone in my throat

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

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The Old Neighborhood

Frankie was working with a crew
replacing a roof in the old
neighborhood when two women

passed on the sidewalk below.
Frankie wolf-whistled, put
his hands behind his head

and gyrated his hips while
the other guys laughed. It was
a long day under a brutal sun

and harassing women was
one of the few perks of the job.
But it was a mistake

to target two women who
had grown up in the neighborhood
and knew a thing or two about

men. Annie, who was ten years
older than Frankie but looked
half her age, was a prison guard

and Maria, a teacher at
Southside High, had grown up
with four brothers. Annie

squinted at Frankie, pointed
and shouted I know who you are.
You’re Mario’s little brother.

Your mother Anastasia Zaveni
scrubbed floors every night of her life
after your pig of a father

left her with seven kids to raise
by herself. It would break
her heart to hear her son

yell at women on the
street, women who have sons
of their own. And Maria

joined in, shouting I’m going
over to Ruth Street right now
to tell Anastasia

you’re a pig just like your
father. And
Big Man Frankie shrank

to a small boy and pleaded
in a voice Annie and Maria
could barely hear

Oh please don’t tell my mother.
Please don’t. Annie could hear
the pain in his voice

and remembered Anastasia’s
shame at her poverty
and pride in her boys

and she knew she and Maria
would never tell Anastasia.
But the guys on the crew

roared with laughter
at Frankie getting schooled
by two tough broads,

and the rest of the day
the foreman gave Frankie
the roughest jobs on

the hottest part of the roof
and when Frankie complained
the other guys who now

remembered their own mothers,
sisters, wives and daughters
told him to shut his trap

or they would tell his mother
what a miserable excuse of a man
she’d raised.

*

Summers

Klaus and I painted
my house waiting
for my son to be born
Mac and I delivered
gravel all summer

The summer I taught
fourteen year old boys
unsteady in their desks
the summer the cop
arrested me in pity

The summer my first wife
fled from me and I woke
in the back of a truck
with men speaking Spanish

But that was long before
I woke every dawn
to swim two miles
beside the old man
who loved everyone

My son was born blue
in summer my daughter
pink in summer I remember
The summer of our delinquency
The summer of our deliverance

The summer I stole a surfboard
and spent the whole day
riding waves to shore

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

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Forgetting

In my mother’s last years
She’d forget where she lived
Frightening for a homebody
Who loved to rock in her chair
Reading in front of the fire
Untethered from the familiar
Like a kite with a broken string

My father indulged her
Tender to the very end
When I was growing up
He never touched me except
With his fists so the last time
I saw him I took him in my arms
Gently like a bundle of twigs
I could easily break but didn’t

*

Nopales

We were driving across the dry plains
west of Austin. Miles and miles
of miles and miles
of cactus

What are those? My son asked
Prickly pear, I answered
If you ever find yourself lost
in the desert

you can break apart the leaves
and suck the moisture I said
pretending to know lots of stuff

They’re edible? He asked. Yeah,
the leaves are called nopales

Have you ever eaten one? He asked
Hoping to catch me out

Oh yeah, lots, I said. In omelets
How come I’ve never heard of them?
He asked. Because anglos
Don’t eat them, I said as if
we’re not anglo mostly

This happened a year or so before
the compulsion, the erosion
of soul began for both of us

We were driving across Texas to visit
my folks in Llano. He’d spend
the summer with his cousin

jumping off the rusty iron bridge
into the river, taking girls to the movies
and driving a four-wheeler over the pink granite
of the riverbank behind my parent’s house

It was Nicholas’s last summer as a boy
my last summer of pretending
to know anything at all

*

Michael Simms is the founder of Vox Populi and Autumn House Press. His poetry collections include American Ash, Nightjar and Strange Meadowlark. His speculative fiction novels include Bicycles of the Gods and The Talon Trilogy. His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Poem-a-Day published by The Academy of American Poets, ONE ART and Plume Poetry. In 2011, Simms was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his service to the arts.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART ~ 16 Comments

Ecstasy

Someone offered me Ecstasy
And I wondered what they had in mind.
Perhaps lying on a beach on the island
of Antigua, the sun on my skin, a red sail
in the distance soon to arrive?
Cooking a marinara sauce while listening
To Pavarotti reach the high notes?
Waking in bed next to you, light
Slanting across the bed, our love
Awake again after sleeping too long?
Watching you push our daughter
Into the midwife’s hands, the tiny face
squinched against the new day,
an old soul among us again? Sledding
with our son down the long hill
Of his childhood, and years later
Holding him in my arms after
He emerged from the darkness
Still alive? My falling on my knees
After the years of worry, thanking
What-is for delivering this miracle?
What is Ecstasy, but a blue pill
Of gratitude, a recognition
all I love is an undeserved gift
slipping away even now?

*

Envy

I hear on NPR an interview
with my friend from grad school
who won a Presidential Medal
and stood on the White House lawn
with other luminaries of our age.
My friend is appropriately
modest about her accomplishment
so I say to my wife Good for her
no one deserves fame more
but an ugly little corner of my soul
hates my friend’s success
because it makes me feel small
untalented and undeserving. I spend
the rest of the day brooding about
my trifling pathetic life, writing for
a handful of indulgent friends and
former students. After a day of staring
at the white screen of my failure
I hear you come through the door
home at last from the trauma workshop
you teach. You tell me of a young man
who held his dying brother in his arms
after a drive by and how the family
is still grieving years later and how
the workshop has given the young man
a few tools to help his family recover
and then we read an email from a friend
who now lives with her two children
in a refugee shelter in Poland
while her husband is fighting
somewhere near the Russian border
and I think of my own brave brother
in Houston who discovered the provost
of his university has been lying
and stealing and Jack went
on television to speak truth to power
and lost his job… And even my dog Josie
faces each day with the thrill of play,
the joy of long walks through the alleys
and faith I’ll place a bowl of her favorite foods
on the floor. And then you pull pasta
out of the pantry, I dress a green salad
with care and my self-pity fades
into the evening ritual of loving gestures
and I feel joy and gratitude for the gifts
I’ve been given in this one small life

*

Michael Simms is the founder of Vox Populi and Autumn House Press. His poetry collections include American Ash, Nightjar and Strange Meadowlark. His speculative fiction novels include Bicycles of the Gods and The Talon Trilogy. His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Poem-a-Day published by The Academy of American Poets, ONE ART and Plume Poetry. In 2011, Simms was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his service to the arts.

Three Poems by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Sidewalk Drain with Moss and String

If it’s human
to put things in categories
like putting them in a bag
a few pebbles collected in the alley
for their odd striations of color
you imagine forged in a volcano
when volcanos were a thing around here
a tattered notebook with a few scribbles
you wrote after your mother died
a hatband, a rubber band, a hairclip
dropped by a girl you were afraid to speak to
and out of the whole deck you saved only
this Jack of Spades winking at you knowing
something about you that keeps changing
if this hoarding of memories
is what makes you human then
are crows our cousins
carrying bits of yarn and bottle caps
to their nests weaving shiny things
into their homes the way
you brought home a photo
of a sidewalk drain full of green moss
and two pink roots curving onto the aggregate
and on one of the roots a piece of string
with three pieces of red brick beside the moss
because happiness clings to small things?

***

America

Beside the highway outside McKeesport PA
a state trooper has pulled over a black man
who leans against his rusty Ford
palms flat, feet apart
assuming the position
as we say in America.

The smokey in his broad brimmed hat
and menacing chin strap
which is leather, like the leather of his boots
and belt and holster, wears his hat
low, his face in shadow.

Beside us, the Monongahela River
quickens, making its way
through abandoned pastures
and ruined river towns
on its way to the Ohio.

As the smokey rummages through
the car, the man shrinks in his clothes,
catches my eye, then looks down
ashamed. What’s he done? I wonder
What’s the trooper done?

What have I done,
what have I ever done
but look away / up the road
toward the beautiful Laurel Highlands
hidden in the white mist of America?

***

A Cowboy in the Chapel of Bones

Baby Head Cemetery, Llano Texas

Where I come from
it’s bad manners to speak of death
except in dead metaphors. Kick the bucket. Bite the Dust.
Give up the ghost. Swan song – a pretty phrase, but bad ornithology.
I once heard a lady from London call dying Popping your clogs
as if we throw off a pair of muddy shoes after a long walk in the rain,
appropriate no doubt in London but not in the dusty streets of Llano Texas
where tooled boots Death might wear are the rage.

Cowboys are Calvinists.
We like the dead to stay dead,
ashes to ashes with no dust left over, no grave to visit.
Ancient cemeteries are just grazing land, undeveloped real-estate
waiting its turn to be turned over to developers
of green and gold towers rising above the dry plains.
Capitalism meets fantasy, and death plays no part in the story.

But our dead metaphors are a dead giveaway
that once we had more respect for the dead.
After all, a cliché is simply a beautiful phrase
we ride hot and put away wet until it weakens and dies.

*

On Día de los Muertos
my ex-in-laws visit the cemetery to pray and party
with the dead, a celebration of mortality.
They laugh, eat, drink, wear tall masks of demons,
make gifts to the dead and the living alike,
skulls made of sugar and pan de muerto with frosting shaped like bones.

I love the calaveras literarias, irreverent epitaphs dedicated to the living.
Mourning his mother who stands alive in front of him, Rudolfo recites
Como extraño sus tamales, empanadas y atolito;
voy a tener que aprender a cocinar yo solito.
(He misses his mother because he hates his own cooking.)

Joking with death reminds us
it’s the only imperative, the one necessity
giving urgency to our lives.
When we remember what we’d rather forget
we see and speak more clearly,
every day becomes an emergency, an emergence, an aparición
forcing us to become fierce about our faith,
to taste the chocolate before it’s gone,
to love the lover before the body fades
and to honor the body with marigold before it rots.

*

I remember years ago in Portugal
walking into the Chapel of Bones as if in a dream,
skulls, femurs, vertebrae cemented into walls,
three high windows casting a skeleton of light on the floor.
Our guide Virgilio told us the Capela dos Ossos
reminds us of the swift passage of life on earth.

No shit, I thought. 5,000 corpses, he said,
peasants exhumed from Évora’s medieval cemeteries,
bones arranged by the Franciscans in squares, spirals, pyramids,
a ceiling of white brick painted with black motifs.
Skulls scribbled with graffiti. Skeletons hanging from ropes.
Two desiccated corpses, one a child, in glass cases.
Aonde vais, caminhante, acelerado?
Where are you going in such a hurry, traveler?

***

Michael Simms has worked as a squire to a Hungarian fencing master, a stable hand, a gardener, a forager, an estate agent, a college teacher, an editor, a publisher, a technical writer, and a literary impresario. He identifies as being on the spectrum and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who didn’t speak until he was five years old. He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. A resident of Pittsburgh, in 2011 he was recognized by the Pennsylvania Senate for his contribution to the arts. His most recent books include two poetry collections — American Ash and Nightjar – published by Ragged Sky; and two novels — Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy and The Green Mage, both published by Madville.