Robyn Art
My Strange Addiction
So what if I’m still too busy paying the rent
to take up serpents, pack the wound with sugar,
the hours like a chain of penitents
yanked along the village road,
the cloaked whatever perpetually hovering.
That shadowy rictus beyond the moon’s indomitable fist,
faintest blip on the hacienda’s lakeside vista?
That’s b-side of me: less astral projection,
more stoned-under-the-bleachers feeling.
I haven’t failed, I’ve just found a hundred words
that don’t mean snow.
1. Love is a highway.
2. All roads lead to the sea.
Anger Management
Yeah, we tried the breathing,
tried kicking it in the banya with the octogenaric Russians
and the Viking wannabees,
ditto adult kickball,
reptile husbandry—the actual husband
mostly cruising bayside
on the I.T guy’s dope Boston Whaler—(Hello,
hedonic treadmill!)—the crew of hot hillbilly dads
catching snapping turtles bare-handed
on the dock…
Sometimes you’re the indigenous biome
and sometimes the guy in the hazmat suit
pointing the nozzle defiantly downward.
There are two kinds, patient
and slime, our girl tells us;
i.e., are we beings transcendent
or merely centrifugal.
Even in the midst of the lime shortage,
geese arc steadfastly
across the darkening sky. Calmly,
we await our turn in the cabana.
Robyn Art’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol; Action, Spectacle; Slant; and Pine Hills Review. She is the author of The Stunt Double in Winter (Dusie Press) and Farmer, Antagonist (Burnside Review Press).