Poem Renaissance – Zeke Shomler

Gyroscope Review is celebrating National Poetry Month with a Poem Renaissance, a review of previously published poems looking for new life and new views. Every day through May 20^th, a new poem to fall in love with all over again.

On My Parents Reassuring Me About the Future
by Zeke Shomler

“You have time,” they said, as if time was something I could hold,
could own. They called me starling, a word so much like 
starving. Little star. In my earliest memory, I’m spreading toothpaste
on their comforter: sticky-wet medallions of green purple gold.
Nothing was dangerous then, not even the sting of menthol
in a paper cut, the vacant spaces that form when I spread
my fingers into five small towers. Little flesh-spears. Tiny violences 
waiting in the wings. I keep having dreams about dying, over and over,
drowning in a sea of thick white paste, calling out for my dead brother,
believing I can save him. There is no going backward: there is only
this dream of my own unmaking, then the sour smell of a mattress
soaked in sweat. I have been a child all my life, waiting for time
to unbend itself like a newborn pulled from the womb. My mother wears
my birth as a smooth scar across her abdomen, memory embedded
in the skin. She tells me: you are not a thing that pushed yourself out
but something much less urgent. It was easy. It took hardly any time at all. 


                    Original publisher: MAYDAY Magazine



Zeke Shomler is a poet and educator in Fairbanks, Alaska. A Pushcart nominee, his poems have appeared in Folio, Sierra Nevada Review, The Shore, and elsewhere. More of his work can be found at www.zekeshomler.com

Don’t forget to read the Spring 2025 Issue, available now, online and in print

Previous Renaissance Poets

April Poets