Robin Ekiss is the author of The Mansion of Happiness (University of Georgia Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize, and a finalist for the Balcones Poetry Prize, Northern California Book Award, and Commonwealth Club’s California Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Kenyon Review, […]
I was raised in the company of dolls. My mother, the miniaturist, made pies the size of thumbnails. My father, the shadowboxer, talked only to the dark. No one here remembers the love of a chair for its ottoman or the privacy of a shut door. Windows grieve in their sashes. […]
When I was born, there was no noise for him, while she heard everything at once: roil of water steaming the windows, damper of milk rushing in to the ducts, clockwork cry of each contraction, again and again, the same frustration— unable to feed itself or feel the illuminated touch that makes […]
Nested inside her like successive Russian dolls— how much I might love, how brown my eyes or this Roman nose that migrates across my face. The smallest stamp of bees across the apron of a dog rose— how much room is there for impatient tendency? Only my […]
Of the face in general, let me say it’s a house built by men and lived in by their dreams. When you’ve been plucking eyes out of the floorboards as long as I have, you’ll see this, just as you’d see the patience it requires to render an eyebrow, half an hour […]
The question of my mother is on the table. The dark box of her mind is also there, the garden of everywhere we used to walk together. Among the things the body doesn’t know, it is the dark box I return to most: fallopian city engrained in memory, ghost-orchid egg in the arboretum, […]
Songs of cagelings like goldfinch embalmed in wax— what is it birds sing about anyway, their thimbled bodies flashed through with convulsions? Do they stop warbling in the cornucopic ear if happiness finds no currency here? Listen: a woman may be stretched in the intimate pose […]
I’m no longer in love with the sand that makes the pearl, or anything grainy that hardens its beauty by passing through pain. Bone revisits the porous soil and presses itself into coal. Whole colonies of canaries refuse to return from that mine. Is there anything yellower than their dark […]