ELMER ALMIGHTY Yvonne Zipter My grandfather was a god to me, bronzed from his secret Ashkenazi blood and tattooed with the scars of a workingman's life. Mechanical things perceived his supremacy and did as he bid. Midas-like, he could transform trash into treasure, turned Goodwill garbage into a golden dresser graced with brass lion heads the size of quarters biting the rings of the drawer pulls. With his own hands, he built a house for his wife, the pine door frames bleeding the resinous sap of their marriage for years on end. He rose from the hard-packed earth of immigrant Milwaukee, an elm sapling growing as beautiful as he was sturdy. In the attic he shared with his brothers, I see him breaking the glassy skin of ice atop a chipped china bowl, mornings, to splash glacial water on his callow cheeks. It was so cold, he would said, with every telling, you could see the frost on the heads of the nails, which glinted, I imagine, like constellations of frozen stars he could touch, so close he was, always, to heaven. Yvonne Zipter is the author of the full-length collection *The Patience of Metal* (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist) and the chapbook *Like Some Bookie God*. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals over the years, including *Poetry*, *Southern Humanities Review*, *Calyx*, *Crab Orchard Review*, *Metronome of Aptekarsky Ostrov* (Russia), *Bellingham Review, *and *Spoon River Poetry Review,* as well as in several anthologies *.* She is also the author of two nonfiction books: *Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend* and *Ransacking the Closet*. Her published poems are currently being sold in two poetry-vending machines in Chicago, from which the proceeds are donated to a nonprofit arts organization called Arts Alive Chicago. She recently retired from being a manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press. You can find her on Facebook @YvonneZipterWrites and Twitter @YvonneZipter Previous Poem  Table of Contents  Next Poem