Forever as if she and I are contesting
who’s the more hurt—
the one who recalls, or the one who goes
blank.
Flat fronts of goldenrod robes as we girls
soprano-ed
for pews of men. Explosion when the neigh-
bor boys were paid
once to watch us (sweat pouring in mud
eyes)—games
with chairs, red imprint of rope on thighs.
In every reflection,
the smallest hope pants. Still, we were left
with miles
of wildflowers snowed over, barely either
dreaming
as before—the most open blooms, stolen.
Liz Robbins' third collection, Freaked, won the 2014 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award; her second collection, Play Button, won the 2010 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review Online, and Rattle, as well as on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. She’s an associate professor of creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL.