Using absolute_import and handling relative module name conflicts in python

I really hope this is a simple case of me miss-understanding the complex Python2 import mechanisms. I have the following setup:

$> ls -ltr pypackage1 
total 3
-rw-r--r-- 1 pelson pelson   0 Aug 17 19:20 io.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 pelson pelson   0 Aug 17 19:20 __init__.py
-rw-r--r-- 1 pelson pelson  57 Aug 17 19:22 code.py
$> cat pypackage1/code.py 
from __future__ import absolute_import

import zipfile

i.e. I have nothing but a stub package with an empty __init__.py and io.py, and a 2 lines code.py file.

I can import pypackage1:

$> python -c "import pypackage1.code"

But I cannot run the code.py file:

$> python pypackage1/code.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "pypackage1/code.py", line 3, in <module>
    import zipfile
  File "python2.7/zipfile.py", line 462, in <module>
    class ZipExtFile(io.BufferedIOBase):
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'BufferedIOBase'

Clearly the problem has to do with the zipfile module picking up my relative io module over the builtin io module, but I thought my from __future__ import absolute_import would have fixed that.

Thanks in advance for any help,