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