Blinds

Liz Robbins

she/her

Because I hate my rage,
   I take it on a walk,
shifting my latest gripe side to side,
   angle to angle, like a lemon lozenge
in my mouth.
   Eventually, the cool air and
endorphins work their magic dissolution,
   and I return home, emptied.
Good, there’s a process to loosen
a block.
Hard, the need to drain is never
gone.
   Now the sun overhead makes
its tart retort:
   Joy, joy, it reminds,
and I recall days where a gray mood hung
   about for hours like a force I could
not shift.
I open the blinds, stare for long minutes
at the street I walked,
   where an hour before, the absence
of anyone was like the impermanence of
anger
   (what rage needs to know is that it
needs other people more than itself)—
   and I see again how much
I’d give up
my darkness, my way,
      just to be seen.

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Liz Robbins' fourth full-length collection, Night Swimming, won the 2023 Cold Mountain Press Annual Book Contest. Her collaborative chapbook on mental health, Fire Carousel, is newly out from Main Street Rag Press (2023). Her third collection, Freaked, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award, with Bruce Bond as judge; her second collection, Play Button, won the Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. Her first collection, Hope, As the World Is a Scorpion Fish (U Nebraska), and her chapbook, Girls Turned Like Dials, won the 8th Annual YellowJacket Press Prize. Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Penn Review, Rattle, and RHINO. She received a Pushcart Prize nomination from Fugue and has judged contests for Elixir Press, Ploughshares, and New Ohio Review. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, and works as an editor and a poetry screener for Ploughshares.