Robert James Russell

Two poems of mine are now published in issue #20 of the online lit mag The Legendary: “Tequila Sunrise” and “Memorial Day 2010.”

Check them out here.

Exciting stuff.

The online lit mag Like Birds Lit has published my poem “A Bar in Wixom, Michigan on a Tuesday Night.”

Check it out here.

Her smile makes me ache;
those eyes like galaxies – wanting and
hungry – portals into another
place and time. In the rain
I hold her close our hands
tangled we kiss electric.
She is Hope, evidence
of something more.

I want so much to be like Chuck
finding my salvation at the bottom of a bottle and
scoring leftover prescription pills from friends of friends, but
I fall short and can’t quite manage to recreate his gritty realism
and I wonder if it’s because I’ve
never had the struggles he did, the crippling
alcoholism, the bouts with depression
the whores at the ready their fingers painted brightly
the long walks and the mornings after, the
biting migraines chewing away at you slowly
the only salvation
the words creeping out of your pen
onto the motel stationary,
your thoughts
the only sanity you have left.

God damn you women get me all
twisted up thinking oohrahrah and lala
about us about our night together you
beg me to hang out you say you want
to get to know me you want to come over
and watch movies with me and meet my dog
you say you’ve never met anyone like me
that I could be the greatest the best
make your eyes melt mama yet
when it comes down to it you’re scared
you don’t know what you want you don’t
want to get all used up and you
leave me you leave this imprint on me
but it’s okay I’ll love you anyway
take you back into my arms and
we’ll celebrate into the night
skin touching eyes dodging bodies
dancing while I fall into you –
can’t ever find my way out.

(This first appeared on Year Zero Writers)

She’s an obese woman whose clothes
don’t fit: shirts that ride up too high
her belly hanging out her pants
suctioned to her strangely pegged legs.
Her ballooned cheeks are always chapped pink
her lips little slivers peeled back over
small beige teeth like riverstones
set in swollen gums. Her hair is
luxurious but she doesn’t seem
to know what to do with it; she often
touches loose strands when people walk by,
a nervous tick perhaps.
Her sister is always visiting and they
gather outside my window
pacing and talking in loud practiced dialogues
about their collective woes.
She’s married to a Mexican man
half her size named Marco whom
she fights with daily, usually about
their daughter, a small wispy thing
that never makes a peep.
She has eyes like wildfires
but you can tell, talking to her even briefly,
that she doesn’t expect to get
to where it is she wishes she was going.

like a hundred cracks of thunder

or my brain seizing up, going all floppy on me

little whirlwind dreamscapes brought to life by a single touch

a single look

the look she knows how to throw

perfected since adolescence, perfected since her first crush on that boy, Kevin

her first kiss

but she can take that same look and change it, make it hard and mean

a woman scorned

her look like daggers coming fast and hard

a train barreling toward you

and you wonder what you did

what did I do?

but when its good its good and her body

you have it memorized

you know how it tastes

smells

feels against yours

and even on the worst of days when things are bad

between you two and the world

even on those days it’s pretty damn good and you wonder

how you could have ever lived without her

and during those moments the world is a very beautiful place

and you two, the last survivors of love, make it your own

In her eyes I see the world.

Her laugh like a sunrise her smile says it all the world is hers and she has it
in her hands.

Too beautiful for words,
she sings the song that has no name.

For she is the one they sang of long ago:
She Who Knows How to Make Right Use
of the Heart.