Matryoshka
Fred Zirm
for Meg
And so the generations nest
inside each other like reversible Russian dolls: the woman who is my child has a child within her now who may hold memories of me for future family tales, just as I recall my father’s strength and my mother’s touch when I think of infants in my arms.
Thus, the bigger begets and is begotten by the small when we embrace and are embraced by what we are and were and will become, doll within doll within doll, with our love bearing one another, the holder and the held, back to the cradle and back from the brink again and again and again until the very beginning meets the very end.
After earning a B.A. and M.A. in English from Michigan State and an M.F.A. from the Playwrights Workshop at University of Iowa, Fred Zirm taught English and drama for almost forty years at an independent school for boys in Maryland. Since retirement, he has continued to direct plays but have also focused on writing. His poetry, flash fiction, and creative non-fiction have been published in more than a dozen literary journals or anthologies, including Still Crazy, Voices de la Luna, NEAT, The Rejected Quarterly, cahoodadoodaling (Pushcart Prize nominee), Greek Fire, Poeming Pigeons, and Objects in the Rearview Mirror. Fred’s poetry chapbook, Object Lessons, was published in January 2021 by Main Street Rag.
He once spent a month traveling through Greece by bicycle on his own