Liz Robbins

Balm of Hurt Minds (Sleep)

For every Jack Torrance, there’s a Wendy,
which is to say, a clever tyrant needs his
worrying goose.

Troubling, the character in The Shining
who grows unhinged by miles of snow,
a metaphor 

for the blank page, impotence writ vast,
where the only possible ending is dead-
frozen, lost in

labyrinths of one’s own making? It’s also
a portrait of sadism, where the fantasy
exists that

the mighty are felled by the small. In reality,
we’re attracted to the strong, and yes,
Nicholson is one

of our most admired actors, while Duvall,
tabloids report, is half-starved, sleeping in
her car. It’s

complex, I know, but some are hurt more
easily, and a certain kind of power sees in this
opportunity, not an

injunction to be kind. As with clairvoyance—
the smell of oranges before dead girls in blue
appear—there’s

always one who sputters in protest, saying
it can’t exist, until it’s like even the idea
never did.

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Liz Robbins' fourth full-length collection, Night Swimming, won the 2023 Cold Mountain Press Annual Book Contest. Her third collection, Freaked, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award, judged by Bruce Bond; her second collection, Play Button, won the Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review and Missouri Review and she received a Pushcart nomination from Fugue. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, where she works as an editor, as well as a poetry screener for Ploughshares.