Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Six
November- December 2025
The Shore, poems by Michael Simms.
The Babysitter’s House
Beside the Railroad Tracks
We slept two in a bed next to the trains
rocking the house as they passed
through the middle of our sleep
in the back room. The smell of grief
seeped beneath the closet doors
and kept me awake. I moved like a ghost
among sleeping children and stood
at the window, the roar of the night
pushing against me as if
the windowsill opened to a hurricane
of dark and light carrying the dead
to the next life. The mosquitoes on the glass
were lost angels and the babysitter’s
dead husband still wanted his tea
and pickles. Sometimes an open boxcar
passed by and I could almost see
the straw where men rested on their way
to the nowhere I remembered years later
when I ran from my father’s fists
following the rails that might lead to my real home,
and a dark man named Jesus, just a man,
not god or angel, but a man
walked beside me and asked where I was born
which was somewhere miles behind in the railyards
where my grandfather was spending his life
in unconscious penance
because his father had been consumed by fire
when the locomotive he engineered
jumped the track on a curve and crashed
into a lumbermill killing a dozen men.
There were rules that governed such things.
Rules we understood and others we didn’t.
When two boys shared a bed, for example,
no touching. The space between you is fraught
with confusion. No breathing in each other’s faces
either. Your brand new bodies should be turned away
like strangers who’ve fallen asleep on a train.
The room was full of children carried through the night
on gleaming rails. The train ran through our sleep
the way a fire moves through dry leaves, dark smells,
wavering light, and a boy in cotton underpants
at the window in the heavy summer air
The Shore
When I left home at eighteen I knew
I’d come back only as a ghost,
not as someone dead but as someone who no longer believed
the net of fictions that kept my parents alive and trapped.
I won’t call them lies because the intent was not to deceive
but to survive. My mother was happy with her life
as long as my father got the final word.
We were unhappy in the way that Tolstoy says
all happy families are the same. But who’s to say
our unhappiness was unusual?
My father used to slap me around
when I got home late at night after rehearsals
for The Trojan Women where I was the Tech Guy
shining blue and amber light on Hecuba, Queen of Troy,
who sat in partial shadow on the shore
beneath the walls of her burning city. Her grief
for her son Hector, a prince who loved his wife and son
and died defending his people, was exquisite.
I never understood how anyone could love his family
the way Hector did until years later when I watched my son
being pushed into the world after a night of labor.
He was born blue. The midwife gently massaged his chest
until the first breath squeaked out of him in a weak scream
that grew until it filled all the spaces inside me
I’d never known were empty. Later as my wife and son slept,
I went outside, stood between maples green and dripping
in the summer night and looked up between the branches
and saw only a few stars, faint and far away, but persistent.
Back in the day, I didn’t know my father was teaching me
how to be the good man he wasn’t, but thought he was.
He showed me the wrong path, so I’d know the right one.
Weird isn’t it, how everything works out in the end?
The last thing my father said to me was I’m sorry.
He didn’t say why, but we both knew.
I know now he was lost, fumbling in the dark
for the key and when he finally found it and opened the door
there was nothing on the other side. Nothing at all.
He’d waited too long.
He died ashamed. As if everything he’d ever done was wrong
which wasn’t true of course. I imagine him by a river
which looks a lot like the Llano with its ragged cliffs and quick rapids
where we poured his ashes mixed with my mother’s.
My father still stands there on the shelf of blue granite
while the boatman lingers. My mother has crossed already
at last breaking free, but my father is waiting for me.
Three Young Poets Drinking
All Night In the Cemetery
of the Black Angel, Iowa City, 1977
Empty of need and pity
wanting something to feel, something to say
hoping to rob this place of its sadness, fodder for our poems
as if we could carry away the urn
of grief long dead parents felt for their child
lost to diphtheria, typhus, pox or pure accident
of snapped neck, bruised heart, cracked skull
dropped, tossed, spiraling through darkness
to land here as we ourselves landed here, drunk
and stupid. Behind the black angel
a tall white column with a spiral of stone roses
and a name I mistook for my own. It seemed
I died at the age of three in 1879.
I turned to tell my buddies,
but they were swigging and laughing.
Frank said he needed to piss and stumbled off to the far edge
of the cemetery where it dropped off, sloping down
to the street that led to the river.
The other guy whose name I no longer remember
stood beneath the black angel, swaying.
His face emptied and became
childlike, as if he’d returned to a time before
cynicism, before this profane joking
that sustained us.
Then we walked home through the long shadows
of the dawn, and the birds began singing
softly at first, then louder
© Michael Simms
Michael Simms is an American poet, novelist and publisher. He is the Founding Editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi Sphere; and the author of five collections of poetry, six speculative novels and a textbook about poetry. His poems have been published in Poetry (Chicago), Scientific American, Plume and Poem-a-day (Academy of American Poets). Simms grew up in the cowboy culture of Texas, but since 1987, he has lived with his wife, the philosopher Eva-Maria Simms, in the historic neighborhood of Mt Washington which overlooks the three rivers of Pittsburgh. Simms has won awards for his environmental activism, and in 2014, Simms was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the Pennsylvania Legislature for his service to the arts.