To the First Twenty Years, Give or Take
It was a childhood of chain link fences &
a dozen kinds of rain an alluvial epoch
of brain & bone & polyhedral dice
muddy ditches & fir trees mailbox rows
Dogs in single file.
these words a surfeit of clinking change
render the past a cosmic vending machine
primer gray & peeling
comic book panels of grandmothers
trailers of men & meth
satanic cults just around the corner
& the only coffee was Folger’s
because we were kids & we were okay
with that
before the advent of the bagel before
the widespread Americanization
of the quesadilla we
were at home with brown skin
& nail guns
there was the widespread weaponization
of America
The Empire Strikes Back
the old gray-blue Gran Torino
1969 or 1970 the rains kept coming
like Kesey himself conjured
them from the rising coastal rivers
the timber & the sand dunes
dirty gulls fucking around the back
entrance to the liquor stores & hardware
stores
did I tell you about the guy who owned
the Coast-to-Coast store who molested
half-a-dozen local boys after giving them
marijuana & booze & buying
one of them a muscle car?
We all knew
and we didn’t tell.
I didn’t like that boy because he was bigger
than me & blond & a bully
he beat me up from time to time
& grew up to be a family man I’ve heard
a foreman of something or a builder
of things probably has children
of his own to knock around
now but when he
was being fucked in the ass by a mustachioed man
a pillar of the community
& getting committed to video
for weed & beer
& a pimpin’ ride
I didn’t care much
because we are still there.
because we are still here
because some of us can’t come down
did I bring up the railroad tracks
bisecting the town like a surgeon’s scar
a place to which I return
often to pick up cans & polished stones
but no that’s the river
We haven’t forgotten about the rain which falls
here on cats & dogs it falls on
deer at the edge of town
falls on
flowers trampled
how many years? Girls I groped
behind
the green light of the church
who died on the highway
a few years later
or who died in someone’s back room some
time ago
who never appeared on the covers
of magazines
whose jeans were acid-washed
who lived in houses with
broken refrigerators
Did we go there on Christmas
did we worship the devil
did we get karate-kicked
to hell by bigger kids on ten-speed
bikes
smoking cigarettes reeking of weed
denim jacket glory seekers
the guy who bought me my first 40 oz
and then wanted me to
touch his dick because
I almost did for another beer but instead
went home
watched the movies Stallone
Schwarzenegger alone
things were blowing up then everything
was blowing up then
wall street was blowing up then
I was hoping to climb inside & not explode
a big balloon blowing up not with nitrous
but
helium or smoke
to float off skyward but not too high
just high enough until my wings started
burning but not high enough
to melt & fall
to end with a mouthful of salt
to end
unacknowledged
apprenticed to the sea
to end up in a sailor suit down the coast on a beach on
a metal boat fighter jets below and/or above
circle around the opening of my third decade—
twenty years behind me
you historical circumstance
& the sun every morning appearing
as from behind a blue mountain
but not an actual mountain
& everything opening up looking beautiful
Mini-interview with Anthony Robinson
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
AR: Just still being alive in the beginning of my sixth decade. Missing people. Avoiding people. Birds. Also, maybe reading Moby-Dick when I was twenty-one years old and in the US Navy, landlocked in California’s San Joaquin Valley in the mid 90s. That’s enough grist.
HFR: What are you reading?
AR: Moby-Dick. This past year I read a lot of cookbooks, a lot of history books, and many great poems by the likes of Karen Donovan, John Gallaher, Ben Friedlander, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Tim VanDyke, Lisa Mottolo, and many others too numerous to list.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “To the First Twenty Years, Give or Take”?
AR: I was writing a lot of “autobiographical” narrative poems in the 20teens which was new for me and made me uncomfortable. This was a part of that now mostly abandoned track. It was a reckoning of sorts.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
AR: I’m working on continuing to write, which is difficult lately. I’ve got a chapbook coming out next month from Greentower Press called Broke Republic. A future project, a 2025 project, is probably going to be a collection of short prose pieces. Poems or anecdotes or something. I haven’t figured out just yet.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
AR: Obviously, FUCK DONALD TRUMP. FUCK ELON MUSK. FUCK THE FUCKING HATE GROUP THAT’S THE GOP. I mean, what else is there to say? Well, FREE PALESTINE. DON’T BE A DICK.
Also, though: enjoy every sandwich and be good to each other.
Anthony Robinson has poems in The Iowa Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Gulf Coast, The New York Times, Broken Lens, Bear Review, ZYZZYVA, and other keen places. His book, Failures of the Poets, was published by Canarium Books in 2023. His collection Broke Republic won the Midwest Chapbook Prize from the Laurel Review and will be published by Greentower Press in 2025. He lives in rural Oregon.
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