Selections from Poems 1-36 Zackariah Quillan Retraces. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A poetry collection by Zackariah Quillan. Illustrations by Zackariah Quillan (for now.) This collection is a representation of a constant cycle in my life, and the lives of many others - a cycle of the heart awakening, and the individual reaching out to join the world around them. A world that is new, made up of the past, reshaped in novel and unfamiliar ways. The exploration is through and throughout oneself, leading the individual down routes their internal predecessor may have never considered - and as one reaches out to new places, experiences, people, and feelings, the old trappings and abandonments return in waves, encapsulating the heart piece by piece with every hiccup along the way, looping the reaching of the mind back in and around on itself, tying into knots, compressing, and nally closing its eyes once again. These poems were written over the last two years of my life, from 2019 to 2021, and their assemblage together within these pages comes for me at the beginning or the ending of the cycle, depending on wherein your perspective lies. They are presented within chronological order, and through their arrangement I nd the steps of this emotional cycle to be self-evident and illustrating. So, I invite you to step into your shoes through my own, to contextualize your experience through the crystallization of mine, and nd a future through the retraces of the past. No. 1 i think it's the way that the sky melts in colors, all reds and blues and yellows and purples like some foul blooming bruise, welts raising from days spent waiting for things to get better, i think it's the way that the muggy day air clings to my hair like how it did waiting for your car, or the cool night fog sticks to my skin like walking in the moon to where you waited for me that night, and the di erence being that now i smile, and now i feel free to feel how i smile at rain splashing into puddles, to be reminded not of tears in some endless voracious bowl but instead of healing mists, sprayed upon the sinning masses, begging for repentance and receiving from a kind and merciful god, that sparks this new start forwards. No. 2 love is a little bit like when the waitress comes to bring you your food and then she turns towards another table. love is a little bit like yin and yang, how they circle, endlessly in con ict, hellbent between polar opposites that pull inexorably towards one another. it's a little bit like the way that the sun sets after a long day, leaving the entire world in dusk and darkness spattered with pinpricks of light. but it's also in the way that the sun rises again, piercing the umbra of dark, letting its rose tendrils reach out and caress that cold ailing heart of soil and stone. love is a little bit like the way that waves crash against the bank, day in and day out like a heartbeat, each lapse counting the seconds between the next battery. but love isn't like the battery - love is like the stones the waves embrace, how they ever so slowly wear away, decay, and expose to all who care to glance its core. love is a little bit like god, in how it so freely it takes and gives away, letting you bask in its glory and be left out standing cold in whipping winds and lashing rain. love is a little bit like life, in the way that it starts and stops so suddenly, how it immerses you, feeds air to your lungs, and nally presses it all from your chest. love is a little bit stupid. a little bit ignorant. love is a little bit frigid. yet love is a lot-a-bit intense. No. 6 sometimes, i’ll ll the sinks up with hot water, and i plunge my hands in down to the wrists. i like to pretend that the heat, the creeping, the burn, that travels up my nerves is the warmth of your hand on mine, that the re that i feel is the re of passion lasting, that it’s vigor, excitement. but it's not. it's hot water. and my hands hurt. and you're still so, so far away. No. 7 high aboves the seas of green and deep below trees' canopy, there oats on wings swift, unseen a bird that seldom sings. though through the forests calls do ring and boughs weigh down with aeries, this one its here to there and seldom seems to sit. where others eat on bugs and berries, eagles large hunt small canaries, this one dines far out of sight and seldom ever seems to ght. and as the day turns into night and creatures scope their sleeping sites, there is a bird ying high that seldoms seems to reach the sky. No. 9 long day's night, and though the sun sets low, slow and early, and oft i've battled cold wind's bite, i still shiver, yearning for the intermittent pools of light, i light another cigarette and think of where i’ll stand, on side streets, near shopping malls, by signposts and speedways, i'll light another cigarette, the sound ringing clear of coins in cans, hopeful helpers reaching out to frozen languid hands. No. 11 dusk goes on and into dawn back to dusk and on beyond. i sometimes seem to see your face in window-panes from sunbeams strange, wishing you were here to see the way shit’s changed. but life rolls on and on and on into death and into song onto verse, up in smoke, thinking back to things i couldn’t know about, and the ending that i’d wrote. red light streetlight headlight pouring, pooling on the windshield, sleet pounding on streets, streets still remain still and free. movement, if there at all, goes hidden, unseen, stalking the night with the sight of doppler beams set out teams in ones and twos and threes. a shadow of a shadow, sounds as echoes far away, leave nothing left and not a trace by break of day, leave not one right unturned and not one safe place to stay, and take all of their words, so there is nothing left to say. No. 16 ah shit - it's there again, a gripping fear washing over - waves and beaches. see it now - and watch it turn looks to sneers snarls, snares - faces to leeches. oh fuck - its gone again just as quick as it came - picking up pieces. to see it now - and look back, and back it stares, stares, stares - gone, nothing there. No. 17 i most love the look of lavender and how it looks on you, so pale and muted, gentle soft. a splash of color, so slight, and quietly it turns to a puddle, a pool, a rush, a wave, leaving me stranded upon my isle of you. so salty should these waters be, but instead they taste so clear and blue, the place is warm, but with no sun, and i think i'd like to never leave, but just when my head hits the sand, there will be somewhere a ship, searching hard and fast over water, and o i'll go away, away so slowly for today. No. 18 I. the dirt under a shoe trailed forward on and on, and trailed quickly anon anon and up beyond. II. with the name summer comes chill of winter, and so i let the fall air spring forth to ll my lungs while it lasts. III. a space in time i'd sooner forget, and if you put the choice on a button, id push it again and again and again, let the thoughts swirl about and vacuum from the top to the bottom of the bowl. No. 20, or, “Three Love Poems.” Opening stanza of Mvmt. III courtesy of Hannah Fischer. I. you ll my heart with your hand, and although the heart is further than a stones throw, i'll settle for lling my hand with your own. II. sometimes we kiss and i know that people like to say 'less is more,' well, whatever. you're a good kisser. III. you're lovely; i don't want to use a period because i don't want to stop talking about you. but where i feel i cannot say enough, you've chosen to, without a word, illustrate the margins of my mind and ll the space between the disparate things with ideas that are more sweet and divine. No. 22 delicate like the bomb, i'll carry us piece by piece to someplace where we may grow and twine together from the bottom, keeping peace not pace, and someday when we've grown again to ll the holes between us, maybe then we'll rest and fall into a place where we belong. No. 23 i wish to be bitten by a deadly adder that melts esh to bone, bone to heart, and breaks my chains to you. No. 24 i wish that i knew how to ask for help/ to say i'm sorry/ to let shit go/ to pick the pieces up again. i wish that i could tap into your sound, the inaudible music of the spheres that so often breaks my heart. i wish i could learn to sit still again/ or at least for my brain to stay wherever i set down. i wish that i knew how to tune myself like strings/ like a production machine and shut it down/and strum a chord and watch it wash away. No. 25 i haven't left this bed for days as far as i can tell. i'm feverish; i can't eat, and neither do i sleep, instead i let it gnaw me, until i'm about to burst, until my upset stomach vomits out my heart and the vision that i see of you forces me to force it down. i haven't left this bed for days, ridden and riddled with a sickness growing within me, like a cross, like a cacophony the feeling, so close and so far to the feeling of your embrace, wraps around me like a sarcophagus. No. 26, or “Retraces” today i turned my eyes to look at the mountains and instead i met a wall of grey, all encompassing, shrouding the visage of beauty far away, though i myself was only briskly chill and standing still my back against the dull wind, reverberating back from where i'd come. i thought of what's behind that sheer slate of sleet and storm: a torrent a blitz of white snow racing, rushing as fast as it may to blanket the colors in valleys one shade, the freeze and snap of frost on sap as trees pop and splinter to rain. i took a step, turned my feet to match my eyes, turned my thoughts to match my feet, and watched one print turn to two, four, eight, and for a moment i was there again: although i'm not exactly sure what it is i was, at moments a towering pine whose trunk slowly fractures in the sudden cold after all the time it has endured, others like the needles, whose points poke and prod at those birds who weather the weather in the timebomb, and at times again like the rime that sets in on it all et al. when i blinked again i was myself, my own feet, eyes and mind, and a sudden gust had broken free the sun, casting one sharp ray through the transmuting curtain, winds whipping and winding down, slowly letting snow come to sit still, letting light begin to melt the frost to dew, and leaving lumber corpses to lie fragrant of pine. No. 28 a blue sky sweeps softly to transient orange evening, and into blank night. the clouds probably started rolling in around the time the sun hit the dip of horizoned mountains, because the cerulean sea was free and clear of waves earlier in the day (but i guess i wouldn't know because i slept through the change.) No. 29 the words rarely ever come when it would be most opportune leaving me fumbling for ground when you ask to come again to see me, and when it happens there's you: tall and something short of radiant depending on the light, me: clothed in nothing but my anxiety and my nicotine problem, the words will all come rushing in at once, attening me: pressing my brain to my skull and my skull to the wall. maybe someday you'll get it over with, skip the middleman, and just press my brain to the wall instead. No. 30 the very rst time it happens a curtain draws on the heart, blackened velvet ripples rapturous attention from 'them all,' and when the sheet pulls back again the organ's cleaved in two, aorta freed from myocyte bindings; the parasite skitters blood borne over oorboards while the conductor tips their cap, capillary aneurysm spilling and pooling to the pulse of an ovation standing from chairs.