Author’s Note: My poetic philosophy is to try to express an emotion or describe an image or idea in a ‘few well chosen words’ that capture their essence. Poetry is that wonderful form where less is often more. It also makes the shortest forms, like haiku, tanka, senryu and others the most challenging and often the most rewarding. Memoir poetry is harder to condense, but it’s fun to try….
Bloodlines by Robin Gabbert
after the poem Genealogy by Betsy Sholl
One parent was a dark suit, the other an emerald sheath.
One was Coke bottle lenses, the other—Waterford crystal.
Till late at night, the girl would see the light on in the den.
On the other side of the house, hear only sighs.
One parent was a red T-bird convertible, the other a Pixie haircut
before Mia made it fashionable.
The tattoo on her back was a whirlpool.
One parent was a mirage, the other too close to see without distortion.
One was an enigma, the other Good Housekeeping guaranteed.
One of her parents she read voraciously, the other she only skimmed.
One was a hunter, the other a nester.
In the revolving door of her becoming,
one kept raising the bar, the other kept tightening the safety net.
Thus, her troubled youth, unexpected early exodus.
Still, trying to be the best of both, she kept skinning her knees—
a girl swimming upstream, looking for purchase
Robin Gabbert is the winner of Redwood Writers’ 2025 Fran Claggett-Holland Award and is a Pushcart Poetry Prize nominee for her poem The Palm Reader. In 2024, her poem Invisible was a finalist in the San Francisco Writers’ Conference Poetry Contest and she was long-listed for the Frontier Poetry Tanka Challenge. She has a book of ekphrastic poetry—The Clandestine Life of Paintings, in Poems (2022) and a full-length book of poetry Somehow, I Haven’t Drowned published by Blue Light Press (2025) as well as poetry in state, national, and international poetry anthologies
