JAY ROBINSON
Jay Robinson's poems have appeared in Anti, Mars Hill Review,
Plainsongs, Tar River Poetry. Prose has appeared or is forthcoming in
Agni online, Poetry, and Whiskey Island. He teaches at the University
of Akron, and is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Barn Owl Review.
Shades
They dressed as one other. He pierced
his right ear twice, left one a second time,
slipped into a turtleneck sweater.
She clipped her hair with #4, streaked it
gray along the walls, ironed a new shirt
plucked from the box: checkered,
two shades of green.
They surveyed
their new selves in the mirror, only to realize
they looked exactly as they had before.
Sipping something pink and sweating
in a plastic cup, they realized
no one else had come in costume. Maybe
it’s the wrong party, he told her.
she corrected, Pretending to be yourself is
the ultimate disguise. So he winked at her:
That’s easy for me to say. I don’t have
to pretend anymore.
they danced with other people: She
shoulder to shoulder with a man in pinstripes;
he with his hands on the hips of a woman
in business casual, black hair in a bun.
They stared at each other from across the floor.
Afterwards, she kissed his neck
and threw him onto the bed in their hotel.
He told her, I feel like I’m cheating on me
with myself. She laughed and stuck
her tongue in his ear.
I never knew anyone else at the party.
Okemos
Nothing’s so fun, he said, rolling open
the sliding glass door, as waiting
for the bubble to burst. Peppermint
snapped between her teeth.
if you’re the bubble, she replied.
They were on the back porch, late sun
like a Christmas ornament, the whole sky
a smeared Monet. Red squares of tuna
on the grill.
Something stirred in the woods
behind the house, and they ignored it,
unable to tell how big or small.
I think I’m an old soul, she told him,
chewing on her silver lip ring, plastic spatula
in one hand. I can’t stand how some women
dress, wearing their lacy underthings
on the outside.
all four inches of her black hair again,
despite the evening’s balmy weather.
With a credit card, he picked at bits
of apple chewed into his teeth.
What kind of apple?
He’d just walked out the door.
The whole scene was exotic,
she thought, except for the neighbor
two houses up blasting German death metal.
And what kind of soul am I? he followed.
But she couldn’t hear him, and he
didn’t need the answer anymore.
Something Different
She ordered a Diet Coke and Monte Cristo
because she wanted something different.
The café was crowded with truckers.
Outside, ice bending the branches, engines
idling, everything on the surface
deceptive and slick.
black fishnets, a ruby sash tie skirt.
She’d bleached her long hair blonde
so she wouldn’t fit in. But yesterday
she was a brunette in battered corduroys,
her face unwashed for days.
She couldn’t decide which of her selves
she liked anymore.
Altoids on Sundays and read the obituaries?
Or the one who chewed wintergreen gum,
watched infomercials? Someone
in braids, who spent summer afternoons
snapping pictures of herself? Or the girl
with hair halfway down her back,
her eyes two different colors.
Picasso who said the self is a colony?
she asked the waiter, and readjusted
her ponytail.
and slipped her the check.
the streets of Holland in winter, forgetting
where she’d parked her car, the lake cold, silent,
no one else on the sidewalk.
waited in every shop window she passed.
Skiffs
He worked doubles, a sous chef at Ramon’s.
Chartreuse tattoos of Chinese dragons
rode the muscles of his lower back.
There’s no such thing as mystery, he told her.
Then what’s that I see, she answered,
through your sweaty undershirt? But that
was fifteen years ago, a bad marriage
to another man and two toddlers in between.
Tonight the car radio brought him back,
a song booming from his busted
Mazda’s speakers the night they met,
her first shift over. A swatch of bugs
had swarmed the parking lot’s sticky light.
Later she tossed in bed for an hour or two.
An early summer storm crashed down.
She imagined his hands rapping
bedroom windows.
on the steering wheel, didn’t blink
at high beams of the traffic’s other lanes.
A dust of snow fell. She was so certain
this was the song, she’d swear it
on her children’s soft blonde heads.
They didn’t get a second chance.
He sped from town the next day
for something he’d done the year before.
She never touched his smooth jaw
or kissed his callused fingertips,
and now she was driving her minivan
along Lake Michigan’s shore. Skiffs
of ice dotted the horizon. She imagined
they could drift all the way to Illinois.
Back to Front.
