Clean

Liz Robbins

I take hot baths, one after each john, five or six 
a day, though we’re not supposed to waste water. 
When Pimp Mike gets on my case, shoving a bill 
in my face and adding on extra men, I switch to 
whore’s baths, filling the sink with water and lemon 
soap, wetting the cloth. I wipe all over, then again 
in the secret, moist places. I love you, sings the water, 
I love you, sings the cloth, and I am very young, 
almost embryonic, the water my father, the cloth 
my mother, touching me pristine and in places 
a tender feeling is not so strange. 

Liz Robbins' third collection, Freaked, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award, judged by Bruce Bond; her second collection, Play Button, won the Cider Press Review Book Award, judged by Patricia Smith. Her poems have appeared in Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, BOAAT, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac; her poems are in recent issues of Five Points, Rattle, and Salamander, and forthcoming in The Missouri Review Online. She received a Pushcart nomination from Fugue, and has judged contests for Elixir Press, Ploughshares, and New Ohio Review. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, and works as a poetry screener for Ploughshares.