Issue 3.3
Fall 2023
Lora Robinson
Reflection
In writing this piece, I saw the poem as a facsimile of a fire itself: the careful placements and structures necessary to work in tandem for the thing to catch flame. The feelings reconciled through them—codependency, ardor, near obsession—are as stifling and consuming as the
fire, too.
Last Flight out of Omaha
build me a fire
across a room
or between my collarbones
the young glue of your tectonic joints
holding high architecture
tell me you love me
even in approximations
how closely I brim with the lips
you touch bare skinned
rolling in grasses
turn me over
a haunting equation
solve my humming the burning
brush that blows through
so much chaos and order
in the golden angles
in the sacred geometry
of our mouths
please
architect of fire
ask me to stay
show me the familiar spaces
and your light in between
it found me again
love was a smoke trap
I did not imagine
but then how could I imagine you
all instinct and human
and sketching circles around
this moonless night
I am charcoal tipped
drawn and spiraling
so lost and still
just as human
please
architect of my fires
ask me to stay
let our soft magnet bodies flux
with the current of our hands
flint fingers igniting what is left
of the secrets that hold us separate
and searing
a confluence of bodies cresting
their histories to the surface
granular palimpsests in the rutted
river bed you trudge barefoot
under the hunter's moon with me in tow
doe-eyed and unraveling
in your opaque surround
lucid dreaming that I could be
less liminal and conflicted
and all-at-once
my architect
my fire
what is left holds us
silhouettes of milkweed and night heron
flakes of ash we scrape from our teeth
the rolling river tugging its covers
back over frosting shoulders
me on the last flight out of Omaha
a parallax vapor trail
every door swinging endlessly
banging against the nocturnal enfilade
of the nights the fire built
and broke us
Lora Robinson is a poet and essayist from the East Coast. She is a poetry reader for Cobra Milk, an alumni of Art Farm Nebraska and the May 2023 Inner Loop Author's Corner featured writer. Her work has appeared in The Meadow, The Shore, The West Review, Hooligan, and San Pedro River Review, among others. Her first collection, An Essential Melancholy, is available now through akinoga press.
Lora's Book Recommendations
Promises of Gold, Jose Olivarez
Two Open Doors in a Field, Sophie Klahr
What is Otherwise Infinite, Bianca Stone
Seeing the Body, Rachel Eliza Griffiths
The Wonder Years, Arian Katsimbras