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Robbie Gamble (he/him) lived in East Somerville through most of the 1990s.  He is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Post Road, The Worcester Review, Pangyrus, Salamander, and The Sun. He is the poetry editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and he now divides his time between Brookline and Vermont.

Zoom Reading

Robbie Gamble

That feeling when you click
on the “Leave Meeting” button
and you find yourself
back in your room
the blurred background
returning into focus.
Your poems have dissolved
into the ethos
and for a moment
you are utterly
alone.

Blind Spot

I’m looking for it, allowing the gaze to slide a little left,
nothing unusual, then down a bit, there was some trick
to this I used to know, something about trying to focus
on an imaginary location, two feet in front of the wall,
still nothing, and I’m sorry for not speaking to you about
the thing I did without checking with you beforehand, not
seeing at all how that might affect you or anyone else, really
I’m rather stupefied I didn’t anticipate your reaction, and I
can spin around on my toes, eyes wide, everything seems
to be there, the four walls closing in a little, or else this:
my hands at 10 and 2 steady on the wheel eyes straight ahead
andohmygodwheredidhecomefromreardriversideWHAM!

Amazingly I don’t feel anything, nothing at all
and still I can’t see how you’ve been terribly hurt.

Fifth of July

Last night we hunkered down at home with neighbors
to watch fireworks blinker in far hamlets across the valley,

ethereal nosegays of color and muffle, glowingly benign
at this fair distance, and my friend has been scheduled

for a colonoscopy today, having purged through the night
to clean a path for her doctor’s diagnostic optics. If tyranny

is a polyp, mushrooming onward through our collective
visceral core, tell me, please, do we have a prognosis?

— Robbie Gamble

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