Robert Gibbons

Pandemic

we were already there, the world we created
Is in flux, the buses, cars, and trains

the constant motion, and the friction
between media and man-made, staid

and old, bold rhetoric, bordered on the precipice
of Civil War, and enslavement, the behavior

of an administration, entitled and established
and we bend our will for capital, lapses

in judgment, but a purge, a plague of thought
or the mind crowds in one space, as if exile

or dislocation is good enough like church
or hurt, from years of it, we bend our wills

to this ethic, the better of us, erodes or fades
under the cut throat of urge, we bend too

psychosis, the notion of example and celebrity
the petty penny pinching of scarcity

the purity of Providence, obvious for some
we raid psychology or cosmology, yet

we still judge, but we did not expunge the issues
or statistics, our petition or legalese

and here we are, without unity or union, a constraint
have become fragmented and mutilated.

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Robert Anthony Gibbons, a native Floridian, came to New York City in 2007. His first book, Close to the Tree, was published by Three Rooms Press (2012). His chapbook, Flight, was published by Poets Wear Prada (2019), You Almost Home, boy, published by Harlequin Creatures (2019), and his collaboration with Brooklyn based visual artist, Amy Williams, “Some Little Words” was published by 440 Gallery, Brooklyn (2021). Robert has also been published in over thirty literary magazines and in several notable anthologies including Peregrine, Expound, Promethean, Turtle Island Quarterly, Killer Whale, and Suisun Valley Review, and the Bronx Memoir Project: Vol. 2 published by the Bronx Council of the Arts. Robers is an Obsidian Fellow (2020), Cave Canem Fellow (2019-2021) and has received residencies from the Norman Mailer Foundation (2017) and the DISQUIET International Literary Program (2018). In 2018 he completed his MFA at City College.