Michael Simms

Born and raised in Texas, Michael Simms has worked as a squire and armorer 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, a lexicographer, a political organizer, and a literary impresario. He identifies as being on the spectrum and as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who didn’t speak until he was five years old. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently American Ash and Nightjar, as well as four chapbooks, four novels and a textbook about poetry, and he’s been the lead editor of over 100 published books. As the founding editor of Vox Populi and the founding editor emeritus of Autumn House Press and Coal Hill Review, he was recognized in 2011 by the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his contribution to the arts. Simms and his wife Eva live in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Washington overlooking the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. Click here to see Michael Simms’s website.

Steps

One August afternoon in Dallas, Texas, alone in my apartment, full of self-pity and terror, shaking with delirium tremorsI fell to my knees and surrendered to the Unknown and a weight lifted from my shoulders. The room filled with light.
I went outside, entering the blaze of day.Walking over shimmering sidewalks, passing faces lit from within, I arrived at a meeting covered in sweat, poured a cup of clear water and told the group what happened. They nodded and in plain words each drunk told his storyand every path led here
*
At 12, afraid of the fires of Hell I lay in bed praying in the dark. Then I read of a preacher who lost his faith in God and came to believe in the kernel of goodness in each person. Then came an unquenchable thirst. I went to services with every pretty girl I could findand drank myself to the edge of death.
Since then, I’ve often wanted answers.Is it true the distance between atoms is proportionate to the distance between starsand the world we know is mostly empty space?
When electrons pass each otherdo they entangle, keeping a connection as they travel away,a connection so closethey mirror each other’s motion even on opposite sides of the world?
If so, why did mother leave usand move to a city far awaywhere she was always cold?
*
I don’t know my mother’s last wordsbut my sister’s were I decide
Henry David’s last words were Now comes good sailing followed by two lone words moose and Indian. Henry David died at 44. That’s the thing.We die soon enough.
Unlike Henry David, I often quarrel with Godor at least the God I knew when I was youngbut this afternoon walking homethrough a stand of sunlit mountain laurelI pause, give thanks for this one small life

Odysseus in Hell

My people are evangelicalwhich means good messengerthe angel who arrives with news of grace The night my mother diedI couldn’t sleep I went downstairsmade chamomile teastared into the darknessWhen she came to meI tried to embrace her
This was not a dreamMy people believeyou can be saved if you askand what saved me years ago from the hell of that house was poetry / strangeangel that it was
Grace came from the music of words and Godif you want to call a respite from tormentGod was a character in a story repeated so many times it seemed truelike the story of gravityor the face of the moonlooking downwith a love we wantedto take for granted
My bookshelf was crowded with poets who sang me to sanity
Sitting in the dark hour of my mother’s deathI thought of Odysseusdescending into Hades to speak to Tiresias the blind seerand wandering through the underworldour sly but unwise hero
stumbles across his mother who asks why he’s come to this place of shadow still alive andhe recounts his failureto return home / He askshow she died and she tells himshe died of grief for him / believing he was dead
My mother died of grief as well knowingmy sister blew her brains outin a bathroom in Llano Texaswhile her parents sat on the front porchenjoying the morning
My sister believed no one loved herwhile I believemy mother loved meand my father despised me
I learned to livewith a half-filled holeinside me / I flewto Austin and drove to Llanothrough the dry hills of my childhood
thinking of Odysseustrying three timesto embrace his mothereach time his armspassing through her
I asked myself whyam I in this place of darknessstill alive and I answeredI’m lost and trying to return homeI’ve been lost a long time
But I was once savedbelieve it or notby poetry / You need to understandmy people believeyou can be saved if you ask but first comes atonement
My people believeno matter what you’ve doneyou can fall on your kneesand beg to be savedbut first you must believe
This is how I came to walk through the doorsof the First Baptist Churchof Llano Texas not wanting to be savedanywhere especially herethe place we said goodbye to my sisterthree years before
I saw a hundred peopleonly a few I knewa hundred peoplewho loved my motherthere was song and prayerswaying and singingtestimonialsabout Jesus and how He saves us if we ask
as my mother askedbelieving when she diedshe wasn’t going to a dark placebut to a place of angelssinging in towers of cloudslit from within
She believed she’d be welcomedat the gate by Jesus Himselfand who am Ito say she was wrong?

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