Liz Robbins

Everyone Dies, The End

My sister and I are again in a boat. Miles of sea and nothing,
no land on the horizon.
                                    My sister is thinking ships, she is busy
with oars, mainlining trust.
                                    I dream of disappearance. Dreaming
black depths, dead-fish smell, rust.
                                                            She disapproves.
All day she is stern-wise, sea-worthy, and
                                    I’m down a well, chained to my wanting.
Blinking up at her
                                    head, blinded by yellow. In my pocket,
manna she doesn’t yet know of.
                                    But it doesn’t matter with miles of water
and nothing to drink.
                                    She is hot and brow-furrowed, she wants
me to do something, to move,
                                    and I can’t see what she sees. All I am is
looking, looking, with my eyes
the color of no-help and forever. With my terror, ocean-blue.

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Liz Robbins' most recent chapbook, Backlit, won the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Her fourth collection, Night Swimming, won the 2023 Cold Mountain Press Annual Book Contest. Her third, Freaked, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award, judged by Bruce Bond; her second, Play Button, won the Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. Her first is Hope, As the World Is a Scorpion Fish (U Nebraska). Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review and Missouri Review. She received a Pushcart nomination from Fugue. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, where she works as an editor, as well as a Senior Reader for Ploughshares.