Feature > Poetry

Joshua Robbins

Joshua Robbins is the author of Praise Nothing (University of Arkansas Press, 2013). His recognitions include the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at University of the Incarnate Word. He lives in San Antonio.

The Fire Thief

Dogwood winter stunts
even the wavering roadside
bluestem and switchgrasses,

the radio newsman warns
of black ice, and sixteen-
thousand miles from our

Tennessee plateau,
imprisoned in Caucasus snowpack,
Prometheus clatters his chains.

Our waiting will never
end. Your mother
does the time: doctors

and lab work, revising
our list of names,
and, as if to coax

the tiny flame of you
into our world,
we spend afternoons

making love. My
fingers trace the third-
trimester globed circumference

of you. What emerges
from love begins and ends
and begins again

in the inexplicable.
How like the wheeling
raptor's shadow, its steel

scalpelling, even here,
the flat gleaming belly
of the earth beneath us.