Issue #33.6 Three Poems by Robyn Art
Spirit Week
Like anything else, it begins with travel, With flying too close to the sun in a pair of lame-ass Homemade wings, some minor god-cum-summer-school-wastoid Cooling his heels in Panera bread. These years they’ll remember as barely-escaped, Like hauling a loved one from the burning wreck. Dodgeball, Red Rover, the quaintly violent Children’s games of yesterday. Mondays, a perennial unboxing reel Stuck on continuous play: If we’d known X when we were young, we would’ve what? What? What? What?
Big-Time Imposter Syndrome
We rage-quit. Tried to revive the form. Bought into the hobbyist agriculture craze, the affluents’ love affair with backyard chickens. (The Undead Workout: RU ready for the zombie apocalypse?) Microdosed. Outlasted the oughts, trauma shears held to the century’s inseam. (Kierkegaard's last words: Sweep me up!) That control freak the sun not getting any younger. In the foreground, birches slumped together like a huddle of gloomy teens. (Nietzsche's last words: I understand you!) In the background, final words of the hypnosis game we played as kids: She’s getting Worse! She’s getting worse!
Nostos Algos
The whole world, however large, is only an extended hometown. –Goethe
In the distance between Comeback Tour and Highlights reel, nostalgia is a weapon held to the throat of autumn–owls swooping, ground flecked with frost and gore. Things were different then, not so much hampered by rubrics and enrichment activities, mostly just careening down the icy slope on shredded plastic roll-up sleds to a euphoric, bloody-nosed heap. As a child, you didn’t do enrichment activities. You played in the woods and got poison ivy. Ditto, voted Most Likely to Make A Citizen’s Arrest. First childhood memory: The DDT truck ambling through the neighborhood, kids frolicking in the poison mist. If space is nothing more than refracted light and moves sideways, time is holographic and moves backwards, a Put In Correct Order chart we made at school: 1) The river was named for the elder. 2) One day, the sons found a river. 3) The river abutted the farmer’s fields. 4) Once a farmer had two sons.
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Robyn Art is the author of "The Stunt Double in Winter" (Dusie) and "Farmer, Antagonist" (Burnside Review Press) as well as several chapbooks from dancing girl press. Recent work appears in Puerto Del Sol, Slant, Pine Hills Review, Action, Spectacle, and Ballast.
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