Four Poems from Greg Zorko

Greek gods
Life is torture punctuated by brief moments of aggressive un-torture. Ask the turtle who had his shell ripped off slowly and replaced with a plastic one.
        The Greek gods were like giant Al Jefferson’s who lived on a mountain. Other than that I know little about them. A myth is like a clay bowl that never cracks or leaks. “Bolero” is the Spanish word for a useful repetition.
        There are so many of these things to keep track of, that I weep in my mind to save time. It’s quicker than physically weeping. When new coal starts growing in my ear I will say: this is really tremendous.

2 seconds
You wear tin chains and pins on your neck, woman who kills 4 basketballs in 2 seconds. And you have yellow hair, like every lost buffalo should.
There is numbness in my right knee that you can smell, Buffalo who breaks 2 horns in one second. We are running out of time, or time is running itself out against us. You hornless bull, who breaks two molars in an instant.

Secret bomb
        Nowadays every Ghazal is a secret bomb. The bits of iron don’t tell me otherwise, slave relaxing. All the prisons should be emptied, leaving great happy sectors of plaster. Like the mazes in children’s magazines. You can feel silence pulled in when so much noise leaves, so much noise has left here, taking the silence violently. So there is the violence that makes you cry, the love that makes you cry and the metalloids that have you completely.
        You always hold your whats and fors underwater. Why is it that when I write the word “deer”, it becomes our deer? But when I write the word “you” it disappears instantly? This could be explained in your free time, slave reclining. Out in the lake somewhere there is one square foot of soup, go find it.

A coin
You look at me as if you were looking out from the flat face of a coin. Just a giant copper coin pretending to be a human girl. At this point I love you better that way, as a coin I mean.
        I won’t upset anything. Every rabbit dropping is holy to me, in my blood. What’s not in my blood makes me sick and untidy, like the bit of cork that sprints into a wine.
        Esenin wanted to reach the people so he stayed in a hotel room before shooting himself. Vladimir wanted to reach a girl so he stayed in his own room before shooting himself. Only one got his own metro station. I don’t know, I see a big difference here.


My name is Greg. I like poetry, fiction, NBA basketball and history. Some of my work has been published in NANO Fiction, Busk, and Burning Word Magazine. I have forthcoming work in Emerge Literary Journal, Dinosaur Bees and some other nice places. I live and have fun in upstate New York. You can follow me on Twitter @zorknogg.