New Book! Mother Wheel by Tim Robbins

Manmade Drifts

I whisper to myself. It’s more effective

than talking. Stripping away the vowels,

reducing verbal music to a fit of breaths is

often the only hopeful choice. At 3:00

a.m. a snow clearer warns me: Not all

voiceless utterances are soft. In an Oscar

winner I saw last Wednesday, a boy, with

violence surprising from such skinny arms,

blocked his mother’s hate-fueled screams

with a sliding glass door. Boy and viewers

— though we weren’t lip- readers — easily

read faggot! I wake and see my husband’s

mouth doing, as usual, the work of his

nose. I doze and rouse to his breath on my

eyes. It’s been so long, the kiss surprises

like an expletive, scrapes like a plough,

exposes where we are, clears the way for

where we’ll go.

Bio:

Timothy Robbins grew up in a small town with little diversity. He has spent much of his life making up for this lack: living all over the U.S., studying abroad, making a career teaching ESL, and settling down with a Vietnamese husband. He has been a regular contributor to Hanging Loose since 1980. His previous poetry collections are Denny’s Arbor Vitae (2017), and Carrying Bodies (2018). He and his husband live in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

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