The Night Nurses
Mom died and came back two weeks later. Her nurse called me in the middle of the night: she’d rematerialized in an empty bed. I drove out to the hospital and checked every room to prove she was gone. I dreamed the dream again. I checked the beds again. Her night nurse knew me by name. She started treating me like one of the ghosts. The first night mom stayed dead, she called me to see where I was.
The Time Machine
There's a time
machine in my kitchen, but it only moves forward in time at normal speed. It's
more than just a wall clock. The room slows down when its batteries run low. On
the first warm day in February, I took the clock down from the wall and froze
myself in the kitchen forever. Join me. Get stuck in the doorway. Enjoy the
sunlit air.
The Rabbit
A rabbit sat in a
car. He didn’t know how to drive the car, so he just sat in the driver’s seat,
sniffing at the steering wheel, turning his head to look at the sky in the
windows. Because he was so low under the windows, all he could see was the sky.
He thought the car was a flying car, moving very slowly through the faraway
clouds. He saw his image repeated in the changing shapes of the clouds, and
each of them seemed to say, come with us.
Miracles
At a touch of my
hand, the newborn calf breaks into a matrix of butterflies fluttering out into
the afternoon pasture. Never mind she was still steaming with warmth from the
other world: something splendid has just happened. I am the perpetrator of a
miracle. The other farmhands don’t know what they’ve witnessed, and my boss
wants a word with me in the barn.
The Little Boy
after Lorca
A boy went looking
for his voice. He looked for it in the full moon, but she was as silent as he
was. He looked for it in a drop of water, but it dissolved in his hand. He
looked for it in the veins of a leaf, but its green blood was nothing like his.
He looked for it in his mother’s dress, but its skirt was too long. He looked
for it in his father’s shoes, but their soles hurt his feet. He looked for it
under his bed, but all he found were monsters. He looked for it in the mirror,
and his reflection asked him where he'd been.
Robin Arble is a poet and writer from Western Massachusetts. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Oakland Arts Review, beestung, Door Is A Jar, Pøst-, One Art, Overheard, ALOCASIA, Midway Journal, and Your Impossible Voice, among others. They are a poetry reader for Beaver Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Frontier Poetry. She studies literature and creative writing at Hampshire College.