Thin trees rise from the thick texture of the saw palmettos' sharp green leaves. Now I’m writing American sentences just off Grayton Beach. Tree-wood morphed into the shape of a lizard on the soft pine needles. My mother was born in fifty-one; next year she’d be seventy-two. I sometimes wake without dreams, uncertain if I was asleep or not. Drapes drawn, dark room, wind pinching the sky into a sliver of the moon. — MARK ROBINSON
Mark Robinson earned his MFA from Lindenwood University and studied English Literature at the University of Iowa. His poems have appeared in Faultline Journal, River! River!, and Bending Genres, among many others. He was a semi-finalist for Crab Creek Review 2020 poetry contest, and his chapbook Just Last Days was published in January 2020. He currently lives in West Des Moines.