Jane Satterfield
Jane Satterfield has received awards in poetry from the NEA, Bellingham Review, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Mslexia, and more. Her books of poetry are Her Familiars, Assignation at Vanishing Point, Shepherdess with an Automatic, and Apocalypse Mix, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Poetry Prize selected by David St. John. Recent nonfiction is out or forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Superstition Review, Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, and Diagram. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore where she is an associate professor at Loyola University Maryland.
The Zombie Skateboarder at the Bus Stop
doesn’t give a damn about the theory
of eternal return, owns no vintage
paperback editions well-thumbed
by a punk front man twenty years
gone. The park’s troughs have schooled
him on vertigo & all the ways the abyss
will rise & tempt. He knows nothing
of adultish hem & haw, will thrive in the badlands
of failed states & nonfunctioning
governments. The zombie skateboarder
cares little for sparrows, the murder of crows
that hop & hazard, roving their banquet
over the grassy verge. He rides on a free
token, the trouble he’s escaped: the 5-0,
a tough test, a heat-seeking drone.
What matters is the synapses firing,
that his connection arrives, that door sliding
open, bliss within reach, time’s engine
bringing him one step closer to someone
who waits at the end of the line.