Dana Robbins
Midnight. Sleep eludes me.
As hours pass, my brain is full
of the usual black dogs: worry
about my children in this time
of covid; climate change; fear
that democracy is on its last legs.
From the 18th floor, I hear a late train
rumble along the river down the hill
and, in the distance, a faint chorus
of barks and howls, domestic dogs
communing or a pack of wild dogs
or even coyotes that come out
at night to wander the woods by
the tracks. Do the barks foretell
the decline of our civilization?
Will someday the Bronx, my home
that seems so solid, revert to a state
of nature; the forest grown up around
the brick apartments, the way
the jungle closed in on Mayan
ruins in the rain forest?
Or are they simply announcing listen,
I am dog? The barks grow fainter as
I drift off to sleep.
After a long career as a lawyer, Dana Robbins obtained an MFA from the Stonecoast Writers Program of the University of Southern Maine. Dana’s books of poetry, The Left Side of My Life and After the Parade, were published by Moon Pie Press of Westbrook, Maine, in 2015 and 2020, respectively. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals or anthologies, including DASH Literary Journal, Door Is A Jar Magazine, Edison Literary Review, Euphony Journal, Evening Street Review, Existere Journal, Paterson Literary Review, California Quarterly, Calyx, The Cape Rock, Edison Literary Review, Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Magnolia Review, Mount Hope Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, Pennsylvania English, Poetica Magazine, Moth Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, Poydras Review, SLAB, Steam Ticket, Visitant, and Zone 3. Her poem “To My Daughter Teaching Science” was featured by Garrison Keillor on the Writers Almanac in November 2015.
Her work received first prize in the Musehouse Poem of Hope Contest, third prize in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Jewish Poetry in 2018, as well as an honorable mention in 2017, and an honorable mention in the Fish Poetry Contest. In 2020 she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Moon Pie Press. Dana has attended the Curlew Writers Conference, the Bay Path Writers Conference, the Stonecoast Summer Writers’ Conference, and the Wellfleet Writers with Marge Piercy. Recently, she was featured as Poetica Magazine’s poet of the week.