
ROBERT CARR
Featured Poems
Current featured poems focus on my response to the current political climate.
I'm tremendously grateful to James Penha at New Verse News, and Bryan Borland at Sibling Rivalry Press for giving these poems a home.
White Men Writing Race
A liberal is someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do.
- James Baldwin
There is a wise white woman in
my life, counting dead black people.
They break her pulse, her heart.
That’s real. She etches names
into a journal, copper markers
in her garden. She says, “Feel
like maybe it’s someone else’s
story, and I should stick to dandelions.”
Blowball fruits blown into air,
an untenable lawn. High flying
single seeds. Everything about this
poem tells me, Get out of the way.
First Publication: New Verse News September 23, 2017
Censor Approaching
The thrown switch of the state
approaching silence
on my tongue font size
letters measured by a ruler
Drugged by a phone
flag-gagged on the news-reel
tight threads of fish line
tourniquet my dry pen
Speaking volumes in 140 character
fragments the censor’s tweets
sparse My left hand curly
over erasure
pinkie skin unstained
Tied strapped I scribble
Out of laminate black the desktop grows
a wired chair rocks
First Publication: Sibling Rivalry Press, If You Can Hear This, Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration January 20, 2017