SIFT............................................................................................................................................................................AMY ELIZABETH ROBINSON

Sift

Poem by Amy Elizabeth Robinson

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.