Prose, Poetry, and Art since 1956
“Let my worship / be this work / and the force / of each bit / strike / on masonry”. And so, begins Joshua Robbins’ latest collection of poetry, Eschatology in Crayon Wax. With such intriguing titles as “Prayer with a Rotohammer and Stained Glass,” “Apologia Sharpied on Cardboard,” “If Paradise Has Cul-de-sacs,” and “Confession through Honeysuckle and Chain Link,” Robbins masterfully and seemingly effortlessly…
Photo by Stefanie Jockschat on Unsplash
I wake up with urgency’s sandpaper clawspawing at my throat. I crunch downon my breakfast bowl of rusty nails, each bitepumping iron into my veins. My shadow whispers in Morse code, dotsand dashes of dread tapping out each deadline.I wear my panic like a fur coat in July,heavy and sweltering—yet soft and lush. The bedroom’s clock ticks: a cricket on amphetamines,each second a shriek; a…
At my appointment with the first doctor who might finally name the nebulous illness I’ve suffered with for seven years, the intake form requests I list my symptoms; a hazard of myprofession that every ache manifests in metaphor. I want to fill the page: Snake-pit gut, nerves a swarm of needling wasps, joints riddled with buckshot, limbs like a slack-stringed marionette, brain a tinned peach…
By Hand You stood at some imaginedprecipice complaining aboutthe circuitry of your skin the way the cells weresoldered by a boy whosefather never taught him how. You remembered coweringin their workshop, the mooddull as grass or cars. A fine edge cut againstthe grain of sunshine babynear to where you never knew. You remembered but you don’tanymore and that’s the placethat touches you. All your resolve…