Two Poems by Denise S. Robbins
Fight before a Flight
They turned the lights off in the twenty-seat airplane.
The man next to me, texting vigorously,
has a foot on my knee.
A single light shines
on the man in front of me
reading about pop psychology.
The foot man alternates
between snoring
and staring at my screen.
So much for writing.
All I can do is think
about stress
which doesn’t happen
in the brain
but in the fluid surrounding it
and in the feet, which yearn for the ground
and in the fingers, which yearn for the sweater
of the man I love sitting two rows away
whose brain fluid is equally jostled
by the fight
and the feeling of flying
before we leave the ground.
The last to leave
As everyone else cashes out
he orders another stein,
halfway between one pint and two.
I, too, want a forever night.
I want people who know me at my left hip
and a strange dog’s wet nose at my right.
But it’s getting late
and I’ve spent too much on bar beer
and I have to wake up.
But he’s coming back to the table
with jiggly toes and a hop.
But… what’s another water?
I slide into a sober fugue
and he slides somewhere else
on the slippery wooden bench at my hip,
because this is the part where things happen.
I want them to be good things.
I want this to be the part where
we can talk without interruption
by a more interesting conversation.
I want this to be the part where
he goes quiet when he listens,
concentrating on every word.
I want this to be the part where
he sometimes says something beautiful
even if it doesn’t make sense.
But this is the part where
he pauses mid-sentence
because the words have fallen into his beer.
This is the part where I tell a story
that flies up like the helium dragon
he forgot to tie down.
This is the part where I don’t say a thing
but watch his eyes flick open
in a perpetual reawakening.
When I leave, he finds
a group of strangers.
He didn’t need me.
Denise S. Robbins is an author from Wisconsin now living in Washington, DC and can usually be found hovering around Mount Pleasant or Rock Creek Park. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast Journal, Jabberwock Review, and more. She also co-authored ‘Rising Tides: Climate Change Refugees in the Twenty-First Century,’ published by Indiana University Press in 2017.
See more of Denise’s work at denisesrobbins.com
