I'm down. So there are ghosts in this house. I can make them crawl in holes with this small brown bowl of pills like stars, this glass of red fire. My love is a horse in a field once green, now dead, now gold. As they turn, I ask the ghosts where their mouths have gone (the bells mute). They eye the clock, the bones, the door. They need to go, now I want them here. I change minds out of a warped self, a brand of shame. My horse is clay, breaks if it goes too far. My hope is dry as fear is wet. The small brown bowl is a well. I climb up its side. What I trust are stars, that a horse will toss me clear and free.
192 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.