Mother Wheel

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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 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.

Timothy Robbins grew up in a small town with little diversity. He has spent much of his life making up for this 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 , and Carrying Bodies . He and his husband live in Kenosha, Wisconsin.