Rite de Printemps
And I’ll go no more a-maying
dismayed in thermotropic crosshairs
today I coated myself in aspirin
I was resplendent in my coat
down in the willow garden
sucking on bark until my ears rang
and then imperiously through the grove
on a mare with a Daventry mask
ghastly slanders inscribed in its layers
of pressed paper muffled in velvet
I try to speak through the opening
my words catch in the paper
I drowned a maenad in an alpen spring
just weeks before the annual thaw
carried us all down the mountain
a dandelion walks into a meadow
of wildflowers and blows itself away
I plant the lion’s tooth to grow a bigger cat
and ride into town on the back of it
wearing only the masked mare’s head
disporting under sodium floodlights
the fish trees are in bloom again
I’m going over the falls in a barrel bomb
Zack Anderson received his MFA from Notre Dame in 2017. His writing has appeared in Muse/A, Entropy, Smoking Glue Gun, Deluge, The Kenyon Review, and American Microreviews and Interviews. He lives in the Rocky Mountains.