Wordplay with Ben Zimet

by Patrick Coy-Bjork ’23

This month, the editors at The Words are excited to showcase the work of Ben Zimet for Wordplay!

“Ben Zimet is a junior planning to double major in Math and English. They read their poems for an audience for the first time last summer, and they’re excited to continue to create and improve as a writer. Their favorite thing about writing is exploring sound, and trying to make language immediately evocative through sound.”

Enjoy two of their poems below!

Be Banished, My Self Doubt, and May Fiberglass Fill its Place 

I sit Shiva for the sunrise

Until I can carve a facsimile from cardboard

Or find my guiding light 

Under a cairn of cast out overgarments.

I sing my own praises in the shower

But every note is flat, dashed against 

The rocks of mounting evidence,

Sprung forth like Athena

From the only meteorite I can hold in my hands.

The problem with dreaming,

With putting yourself in the glittering, squealing shoes

Of the ones who jump to the rafters 

And shoot from the parking lot,

Is the punch that reminds you

Why they’re called the nosebleeds

Immolation at the Hands of a Rear Back and Wildfire

A miscast stone 

scrapes heretic scalps 

twice a day,

so statistically what’s the point of not

reaching back and firing

whatever you can grab,

whether that be 

paving stones or prayers, 

sharpened sticks or sympathy.

A punch starts from the shoulder

but a good throw

begins as an embrace,

arms reaching for contact

that a projectile’s innominate thud

can’t provide.

So if I’m going to spend the rest of forever 

On this soul-bereft star stud,

I may as well saunter out of the streaming wreckage

Of a flashbang in a fireworks stand,

Pull my lips out of their insistent purse and

Bare my yellowing ursines 

Up at everything that can’t hear the chatter

Of wind up dentures,

Or the agonized yawps of outgrowing illusion.