Andrew Robin

WHEN WE WERE GOLDEN

God bless this Orange Julius.
God bless sucking it atop the lip
of a brown tile mall fountain.
And god bless all the drowned
green dimes of 1986. And god
bless you Tommy Bahamas.
God bless you prone child
drug along by a leash. God
bless the oblivious loose in
the food court tracking baby
puke footprints. God bless
you seagulls walking freely
amongst us. God bless you
coyote curled asleep in a planter.
God bless you ignored public
spankings. God bless you wafts
of hot teriyaki and peach-rhubarb
vapes. God bless you Xanax
and fast-acting insulin. God
bless you pajama bottoms and
panda bear slippers. Dear
America, I think this is it.
Our one gorgeous dream,
that we pay our waking lives
for. That thrums in our phones.
And what if one day we look up
and find nothing gleaming
in place of our want? Just
each of us quiet and alone
with our hearts? But
America, no. That's just
poem-talk. In this life
you'll never have
to know.

EMPHATIC FLIGHT

One can do worse than be
raised by an animatronic beaver.
One could be raised by an animatronic
slug or an animatronic crab, so
count your blessings where they're
found. One gets used to wishing
for an animatronic fox or a wolf
with real howl-voice or a hawk
that nabs animatronic trout from
a water-ish vat. One rare afternoon
at the sea-coast I rolled a
quarter into the slot over and
over again to watch an anima-
tronic whale beach itself. The
sanguine resignation captured
me. In the visitor hut, an old
whale skeleton hung from the
rafters. It was so empty, not
even the animatronic otter feed,
not even the mechanical hatching
swans could recoup me. I begged
a final coin off my beaver and
sank away into one last breaching.
O the precision of loneliness.
O exquisite futility in place
of my guts.

GOD IS REAL

I keep
screaming
God is real!
but nothing
changes.
 
I go
into the
forest to
scream it.
I go out to
Iceberg Point,
I walk into
town and
scream it
there;
 
I flew
all the
way to
fucking
Japan to
scream
it in Kyoto,
in Takayama,
at the hills
of Nagano,
and still
Tim is
dead,
 
still
Tony's
dead,
still
Abby
died,
Briar
too,
still
cancer
killed
Mika,
and
Mary
from
a brain
tumor,
and Erica's
dad and
Ginger
and Brent too,
and Richard
died, and
so did
grandma
Loreen.
 
Some-
times if
you scream
hard enough
you become
a tiny person
praying in
the tiny
church of
your own
clasped
hands.
 
God
hears you
in there
weeping for
your friends,
but if truth
be told you're
crying for
your own
sorrow.
 
And
sometimes
if you scream
hard enough,
fragments
of you just
lift away.
 
& you
sift into
ether,
 
revealing
that clear-sky
emptiness
you suspected
all along was
you.
 
And
a crow flies
through
you.
 
And
that's
all I have
to say about
God being
real.

ANDREW ROBIN is a cardiac nurse, a cancer survivor, and the author of three collections of poetry. His honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, a PSA National Chapbook Fellowship, a Distinguished Teaching Award in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a DAISY Award for exceptional nursing from the University of Washington. He lives with his wife Sarah north of Seattle on Sx’wálech (Lopez Island) in the unceded ancestral waterways of the Coast Salish peoples.