LIZ ROBBINS

So

           ––a one-beat song

 
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.

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  Next week's poet:

 Natalie DiazJJCCCACc