For Southeast Philly
The fragile bones.
The highway snaking
through the maze of rigs.
Refinery
towers rising
and belching invisible
stink into your ovaries
ripe with coming
sickness and perhaps
forbidden or forgotten
desire. The pinched lips.
The dusky pink
carpet stretched out behind glass latched doors.
The elevator narrow
and smoky and closing and rising and releasing
us to more dusky pink,
more stretches of beige to your tall beige door.
Inside,
glass cabinets filled
with plates, tea cups, silver
spoons, leprechauns, Matryoshka
dolls, sheltered from the dust of
what? Of concrete
lots stretching to the edge of the Delaware?
The unspoken legacy of unspoken things,
sifted. The not speaking.
The ladyfingers spongy
under the roofs of our mouths.
Our mouths too full
of sweet things
to ask questions. Still.
Amy Elizabeth Robinson is a poet, historian, and many other things living in the hills of Sonoma County, California. She grew up in the western suburbs of Philadelphia, spent summer vacations in Cape May and Cape May Point, and also went to college in New Jersey. She holds degrees in history from Princeton, University College London, and Stanford, and studies Zen and creativity with the Pacific Zen Institute. She is a Contributing Editor of PZI’s online magazine of Zen and the arts, Uncertainty Club, and her work has also appeared in Deluge, Literary Mama, West Trestle Review, DASH, Vine Leaves, and as part of Rattle’s innovative Poets Respond program.