Back to Issue 5

Ann Robinson

San Joaquin Wildlife Refuge

A single gunshot, sky folded into wings.
Sheets of snow geese
and ibis, ink drops in clouds.

The sandhill cranes never moved.
The wood ducks imitated a painting.
I envied their calm.

At the refuge, I slept for a week
in my car, jacked on caffeine and doughnuts.
Bundled in woolens at night, not a hunter
but a bum.

I lost my job, my watch,
I don’t know the hour
of my return. The tiny camera that shot

the moment into immortality—out of film.
I’m inventing a lexicon
for impermanence.

The white-tailed kite over sedge
never returns, the red-shouldered hawk,
dropped by a bullet.

The no trespassing sign
vanishes when I enter.
When I see flocks among cattails
and road signs,
I am less lonely, a language
that never completes itself.

Ann Robinson's work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary Review, Coachella Review, Compass Rose, Connecticut Review, Diverse Voices Quarterly, The GW Review, Fourteen Hills, Freshwater, Hiram Poetry Review, Jelly Bucket, Natural Bridge, New York Quarterly, Passager, Poet Lore, The Portland Review, RiverSedge, Sanskrit, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Serving House Journal, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Weave Magazine, Willow Review, and Zone 3, among others. Her book of poetry, Stone Window, was published by Bark for Me Publications in 2014

Relearning Math

The boy watched algebra unfold
on the blackboard, trying to imagine
how infinity reached past the stars.

Three miles away, his parents
were entering the Plaza del Rey
when the bomb hit.

Sensors calibrated the explosion,
the eye closes on fiery equations  
as windows were torn from panes.

The enemy was a straight line.
The boy dreamed of oceans and harbors,
his tenth-grade poster of a sailor navigating blue.
You can’t change time, his parents would say.

The teacher held the chalk like a threat.
How do light and sound become an equation?

At the plaza,
the two bodies held each other,
always equal to.

The boy wrote out the correct answer on the blackboard.
Without knowing why, he erased it.