Interstate Nocturne
Proud to announce that Commuter Lit has published Zumwalt’s recent poem, Interstate Nocturne:
Please visit: https://commuterlit.com/2026/02/tuesday-interstate-nocturne/!
Archive for the ‘Free Verse’ Category
Zumwalt Poem at Ink Sweat and Tears: Candidate for Pick of the Month
I am honored to announce that Zumwalt’s recent poem, “take this,” has been selected by the editors of Ink Sweat and Tears as one of their six nominees for pick of the month.
You can read all six selections here:
https://inksweatandtears.co.uk/january-2026-pick-of-the-month/
After reading, if you wish to vote just click on the Vote Here URL that is shown before the text of the six entries.
Gibbon and Toynbee bump into Spengler at Starbucks
Gibbon and Toynbee bump into Spengler at Starbucks
Steel glass shafts
Glint skyward
Glittering silver deceptively erect
Yet reality is whispered
With salient impotence
In sequins, basking
They are ripe for a gaudy technicolor cave-in
To a Muzak score
Rotten props, rotten struts, rotten foundations
Polished pillars once
We’ve lost the varnish
And revel in the grease-spots
And ember-burns
While concealing our leprous nudity
in faded Purple
Thus we pursue Byzantium
At a break-neck stagger into the nitre trough
To be the feast of Seljuk flies
Humming 4-chord progressions
Rotten rags, rotten flesh, rotten sensibilities
No phoenix pyre
The red of flame metamorphosed to rust
And blue-bright iron
Decays to dust
Rubble spawning weeds
And housing ravenous mandible-clapping insects
Living but to shun the day
And suck the husk
Of desiccated brains
—Zumwalt (around 1978?)
Three poems published today at The Good Men Project
Three Zumwalt poems were published as featured content today at The Good Men Project: https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/faceoff-on-facebook/
This is quite an honor to have three lengthy poems of this level of density and abstraction published on a high-traffic site like The Good Men Project. Please visit if you have a minute.
This is a highly visited online publication per Gemini AI: “The Good Men Project: ~2 – 3 Million monthly visitors (varies by source, sometimes listed as 1.9M unique visitors)“
FYI -- the formatting for "roads closed" was lost when posted on their site. UPDATE: Roads closed was removed from their website, requested by me, due to formatting issues. I will post an update when Roads closed is published again.
White Russians with White Vodka
White Russians with White Vodka
The sky peers out over
its trailing cape, wide and pallid,
obscuring the meridian,
erasing the horizontal arguments
of Kamchatka avenues.
Don’t check your map:
it will look much the same as in summer;
it won’t show flurries,
blizzards, cyclones,
meter upon meter
of accumulated snowbanks—
You will not see the swallowed
Lada Grantas, Kia Rios,
Toyota Prados, Cherry Tiggos.
Once one could have turned on a TV
late at night
and seen snow—
now politicians,
talking heads,
social media
whitewash and whitenoise us
non-stop:
ultimately,
we will be head deep,
unable to plow out,
and even Kamchatka
will seem like
a tropical paradise.
–zumwalt (January 2026)
Based on today’s news https://asianmail.in/2026/01/19/record-breaking-snowfall-in-russia-extreme-snow-buries-towns-in-kamchatka/ and this dVerse post’s call to action: https://dversepoets.com/2026/01/20/poetics-new-year-snow/
Grēnland unfæst (Greenland off-balance)
The Greenland saga continues to intensify, and this Zumwalt poem addresses the latest escalation of targeted tariffs, contrasting the gravity of the situation with a bit of humor. Given the history of Greenland with its European associations going back to the 10th century, Zumwalt chose a poetic style common to English speakers of that era: Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter.
“Grēnland unfæst” is the latest published Zumwalt poem, published today at New Verse News: https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2026/01/grenland -unfst-greenland-off-balance.html
This is the third consecutive month that Zumwalt has had a work published at New Verse News and the second day in a row a Zumwalt poem has been published in a literary journal.
No More Cornborers
No More Cornborers
My steel-wool scrubbed & Comet-clean spuds
grate with injurious gusto
Protect the enamel at all costs!
And a sheen is added to our distended
esophagus.
Wintry blasts of fluoride and chlorophyll
attack the waste
But only further pollute the abused
frame.
Death enters the corridors, stalking stealthily
in the Ajax-whiteness.
All is blinding! There is no more gray!
Josephine is become a slaughter-baron.
Ammonia chokes us all
—Zumwalt
[1981?]
Von Bock Was A Pansy
Von Bock Was A Pansy
Those iron plates that churned the mud and gravel
Impress me not.
The rifled bore was, and is a crashing bore,
I shut my eyes to the breechblock and
Do not care for thermite.
I recoil from venturi.
I have only cutting remarks for the bayonet;
C.B.W. stinks.
Give me Gandhi & Walden, with a little pickle
On the side, and I am content.
Blood-red waiters make me yawn.
—Zumwalt
[Early 1980s?]
Slice-of-life, Microwaved
Slice-o-life, Microwaved
Askew in a vinyl cosmos
life’s beading up on
a cold tumbler
And Juan Valdez
has repossessed my mind
for the glory of Brazil
or Colombia
Some squalid country at any rate
Leaving my 33
grooves
scarred by needles at 78
several rich hits
off of
Mrs. Olsen
And Muzak sounds
like steam jets
and
dark mutterings over eggs
become berserk natterings
of rabid chipmunks
Gee Zus !
Only 12:00?
Existence is
deformed
in a
time-warp
—Zumwalt
[Night of 30 Sep-1 Oct 1981, Washington, DC]
The human touch
Based on this recent news event: https://www.npr.org/2025/12/25/g-s1-103683/powerball-player-arkansas-won-jackpot
The human touch
On Christmas Eve, many just like me
stopped at the station where I get my gas
and bought slips of paper
as thin as my patience
waiting its reward.
A mile or so away in Cabot
I closed my own store,
shut down the register,
reminded by the radio of
the size of the jackpot
while I drove home
in my rusty 2003 Tacoma.
Maddie set out some sandwiches—
our light Christmas Eve meal;
two months of watching costs
earned tomorrow’s fortune of presents
paired with roasted prime rib.
That morning came, and our two children
visited us in bed to tug at us—
too small to pull us out
and not old enough to realize they hadn’t.
A delight of flung wrapping paper and
unchecked squeals energized our living room
as, with some guilt, I looked at my phone
to glimpse the weekly Powerball snub.
No ordinary loss:
promised paradise, this time,
came from the station where I staked my three bucks.
But this small defeat brought reassurance:
in a world of algorithms,
predictive apps, and AI advisers
that steal away jobs and raise energy prices
there was still one thing technology couldn’t do:
choose the right numbers.
