SPRING/SUMMER 2026
Three Poems on the Modernists
Elizabeth Robinson
Thelma Wood and Federico Garcia Lorca are hungry
Each imagines, independently of the other, walking along a shore.
Each asserts a right to tragedy. She asserts her claim, and if he is dubious, so what?
He is allowed his own preoccupations.
He is less tall than she is, is slighter. But still hungry.
A blood orange cut into wedges. He says not
much, feels a little
interest in her opulent claims, but more
in how she found what she found, why
she betrayed it. Her horsey face speaks only American, and he
has only Spanish. In the strictest sense.
The petulance of nationality. Her misgivings are all correct. His efficient death.
They find they are linked by what they might imagine saying, but not to each other.
They imagine most
the acid of the orange staining the surface of the table, the transliteration,
and not the translation, of the red juice which should have been orange, and which neither eats as they navigate its coastline.
Isamu Noguchi asks Paul Robeson
The spine is a landscape, I believe, and the architect collects its pliability.
No less pliable a garden than the voice; sunken.
To hope is to be exact, a borderline.
And that is a question?
And that is a request?
To ask is to know ahead of time how the landscape will appear.
A detention, the grandchild of an escapee.
One’s name is reported to mean “courage.”
If courage is an internment camp, a clatter-montage, instead of itself:
the perfected art of restlessness.
And so I ask you.
And so I assent.
Alfred North Whitehead, becoming
Slowly, the planet becomes green or
recedes from its greenness. What
we’d best recall is that one leaf
is not a whole truth.
Inside its garment, its supple
frock, the organism
ripens, but as for its fruit?
Obiter dicta:
what I mean to say is
that truth too is
deciduous.
Truth can be taken off, and so
disrobed.
Naked, I discovered myself as a failed physicist within
a grove and not
an orchard.
The single leaf
turns
and denudes its tree, the pattern irregular and
true because incomplete.
The fruiting season surges
toward me, molts, and reconsiders:
nakedness so restless and persuasive that it
dapples its recipients.
Excerpted from BEING MODERNISTS TOGETHER by Elizabeth Robinson, forthcoming with Solid Objects (November, 2026).