In the evenings, we drink spirits. And in the day, if we can get away with it. Like sipping from clear jars of moonshine, we close our eyes, consume the dead. On the center table, a book of old pictures for us to leaf through. In every room, chairs split from dead trees, chosen by others long ago. If you feel cold in a doorway, if you wake to find your bed full of blood, it's happened before, perhaps it's time to rest. You move the dead, with your red planchette knocking in your chest. They speak most in rooms of books. If you hear them, perhaps it's time to go. If you hear them, it's only as true as your mistrust of the living, and outside, the hills are deaf with snow.
191 The Paris-American
Liz Robbins'
third collection, Freaked, won the 2014 Elixir Press Annual Poetry
Award, judged by Bruce Bond. Her second collection, Play Button, won the
2010 Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith; her album Picked
Strings is a recording of various poems from that collection. Her chapbook Girls
Turned Like Dials won the 2012 YellowJacket Press prize. She won the 2015 Crab
Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and her poems are in
recent or forthcoming issues of American Literary Review, Beloit
Poetry Journal, Cortland Review, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly,
DIAGRAM, Kenyon Review Online, and River Styx. She's an associate
professor of creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla.