liz Robbins
Learn Dutch in a Day
Munro Galloway
Two weeks into the beginning Dutch course,
as she flips through flashcards—heerlijk (lovely),
lekker (tasty)—she finds what she’s been learning.
She turns off the lamp beside the open window
to let it fully rise. Closing her eyes, she brings in
the night, the cool grass scent, the silence
between locusts humming. Here she feels
the hard pulse of her measuring, the strange
unkindness in her life’s frantic learning—
how she judges her minutes at rest as failings.
How obvious—however slight—her relief
when she surpasses someone else. Learning
the language, she sees now—not for a job,
not for a hobby—had been to make herself
feel stronger, the stringing of a splint for
her strained self-reflection. She’d loved too
much, taken too far, Hemingway: that true
nobility lies in being superior to your former
self. Instead, she could try for a tiny dignity
in each moment, turn off for a time the engine
of perpetual goals. Her manual instructs that
the Dutch surround themselves with positive
words—erg goed (very good), zoet (sweet)—
and she sees again their good sense, how they
bring a dash of lightness to everyday interactions,
like how the bright green leaves on beech trees
catch the sun. Tomorrow, she vows, she’ll sit in
her backyard with nothing to study, leaving free
the pine needles she’s due to collect.
The Hours Before the Party
In the passenger seat, I’d hold an open-mouthed bottle
of beer, sing above the lull of tires on the road: always
the song about green eyes and desire buried in its drum-
beat of danger, like the idea of forsaking all to go
gridless out West. My good friend driving, as we crossed
the bridge to where the rich lived, the sun dipping fiery
below the river. She and I, dreaming of boys who might
grow to love us. Perhaps I’d meet mine in a park. He’d
pass me another beer, we’d talk and drift beneath oak trees
to kiss silently. This was before the days got harder, richer,
more gray. Joy more rare, savory. We didn’t know who
we were; we knew exactly. Jen and I, our pockets with change
for the meters, full of music, crossing over. Singing the green-
eyed song that now sparks a sense of loss. Never again
eighteen with all the tiny villages beckoning below. Beyond
the bridge lights, we’d drive in circles past the mansions
engulfed in trees, in the great shadows of power. All I ever
wanted was to be myself, to be known by someone who
loved me. I didn’t see then I had that—before the park,
before the party—laughing in the car with my friend and
no one else to be, driving forward into the spreading dark.
Liz Robbins' third collection, Freaked, won the 2014 Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award; her second collection, Play Button, won the 2010 Cider Press Review Book Award. In 2015, she won the Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry and, in 2016, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Fugue. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kenyon Review Online, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. She’s an associate professor of creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL.