Lora Robinson
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I. I came home in the season I was born / back to drooping wisteria / cattails the color of my doll’s curls / back to scattered marsh / the scent of wet / back to that cement night / my fruiting body flung wide / like stage curtains, church coat closet, veranda blinds / like sermons and the Eucharist // II. before I was mulberry wine, loafing altar girl / before I was kid-sparkler, neon sky chandelier / white hot flame / before I was forge flint and steel / green wood gives more smoke than heat / before I was snuffed candle / the last good Friday / before I was sleeping crescent moon / beside heaved accelerant / before I was survivor's guilt / bleating smoke alarms / before I was palm cinders / damp wood lip-smacked / savoring the ash // III. I fever-craved the metallic taste / of self-immolation / stayed awake to pray / for a cartoonish piano / for a coda I did not have / to write or rehearse / resolved to wipe out / the evidence bag of my body / through squats and deficits / torn tendon and splitting bone / shrank my world in the wash / in the broken levy / I sprung loose and antediluvian / fled for the high desert / left everyone else / to mold and scar // IV. I forgot the vibrato of laughter / how to write like myself / my warmth left my breast / voice scattered for the ducts / my skin grafted to the rug pile / my spine oxidized with the innerspring / and I laid like wet leaves on asphalt / rotten / breaking ankles / the meaning of / prostration / a promise of / obedience / to the crook resting / cold and sharp / at your neck // V. my body was a glass house / I slept there so long / forgot every dream / left every door ajar / woke again to the salmon dawn / red gravel nests / dressed in corals for the disassembly line / offered my flesh to talon / to the natal river / to sulfur and semelparity // |
Lora Robinson is a poet and photographer. She is a poetry reader for Cobra Milk, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Shore, Superfroot, Hooligan, and San Pedro River Review, among others. Her first book, An Essential Melancholy, will be published in 2022 by akinoga press. Connect with her on Instagram @theblondeprive and Twitter @starsinmyteeth.