To Hastings,

the small Southern town that sounds  
like hastening. Where even now your rows  
of cabbage and potatoes lie beneath   
the soil, parched from the eye of the sun.  
Forever the gentle sigh that comes from  
a place cleared of industry. The St. Johns  
river turning in bends and schools of bass,  
as though movement were obvious, military.   
Yesterday, one of your women told me   
her husband’s snuck beers in the backyard   
shed for years and maybe she’ll forgive him.  
They love a young son who can’t know  
that maybe she likes women. The last time  
I drove through, your only diner was boarded  
up, whispers of coke deals inside the barber-  
shop. The white sky, cut in half by trails  
from a one-man plane. In your church-bell  
noon peals, she struggles to love herself.  
Your fish jump, as if compelled. Your non-  
existent jail, known for its solitary.

Liz Robbins

Liz Robbins' third collection, Freaked, won the 2014 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award; her second collection, Play Button, won the 2010 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review Online, and Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac; her poems are in recent issues of Five Points, Rattle, and Salamander. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, and works as a poetry screener for Ploughshares.