Bruce Robinson

Recent work by Bruce Robinson appears or is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Spoon River, Rattle, Mantis, Two Hawks Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, Meniscus, North Dakota Quarterly, Last Stanza, and Aji.

Astern

An umbra was following me, it was neither
late nor early, downtown, yes, yesteryear,
upstairs somewhere a tinny AM
it must have been was playing an old
show tune. There was no one else around,

and you know the slight unease you begin
to feel in the presence of a global absence,
just you and someone whose intent you cannot
recognize, who was it, I couldn’t tell,
even in the lights from the STOP and WALK,

even as it strode past me, not so close
as to raise a warning, just a normal
walkby passing except that we were
two privileged trespassers on what
otherwise would have been an empty street.

Even so, I turned right at the next
corner, wedging a right angle between
what could have been the two of us. And then, nothing
more, not much else, just, you know, the boats
and from somewhere astern a siren.