Robin Wright
The August Selected Poet is Robin Wright
Please feel free to email Robin at: robincwright@aol.com
BAR HORROR
A coffin walks into a bar
Can’t stop coughin’
Drops dead
A vampire walks into a bar
(same bar, see above)
Knows dawn means doom
Sees the coffin
Settles into the satin inside
Hopes everyone thinks he’s dead
Customers clinch their mugs
(again, same bar, see above)
Know no one will believe said story
Drink until ready to drop
Head home
Sleep like they’re dead
Bartender begins clean-up
(you know where he is, right?)
Clutches his left arm
Heart going south
Careens to the coffin
Thuds to the floor
Vampire rises gives mouth to neck
Bartender left not quite dead
TASTE
I picture death
not as some dark
sinister form, but as
the Marlboro Man,
sexy cowboy drawing
his rough hand
to his mouth, taking
a final drag.
GREY LADY GHOST
Swathed in satin-lined bed,
buried in nature’s bosom,
worms and insects creep,
dark soil warms, but
I’ll not go to the grave.
Not yet, yearning,
learning, leave me
strolling the halls
of Willard Library.
I’ll be the most favored
collection of words,
elevator my spine.
I’ll make it rise
and fall at will.
Children’s Section my cover,
I’ll send books sailing
if I feel the need to impress
my presence on the living.
My antics astound all
who enter, some curious
to know what the dead
want to teach the living.
If I leave anything,
it’s not that believing
in ghosts is special,
sanctioned, or sensational.
It’s just that Time,
though she’s wrapped
as a genuine gift,
is a great deceiver.
In the end she’ll abandon,
just like all the others,
leave you settled in
your satin-lined bed,
ants, spiders your bedfellows.
They will love you
as they eat you.
Small nibbles,
while dark soil spreads
her arms around you.
Robin Wright lives in Southern Indiana. Her work has appeared in Panoply, Spank the Carp, Rue Scribe, Terror House Magazine, Rune Bear, Another Way Round, Ariel Chart, Bindweed Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, and others. Two of her poems were published in the University of Southern Indiana’s 50th anniversary anthology, Time Present, Time Past. In 2018 Panoply nominated one of her poems for a Pushcart Prize.