The Old, Red Phone
I am four years old
poking one digit in the O hole
of a new, red rotary phone.
Unafraid of what
I do not know,
I dial out
of our very first home
and leave my parents behind;
all alone. There,
where my father shaved
his foamy cloud cheeks
over the old pink sink.
Back then, when
my mother breathed in
the lavender-scented sheets
before she made the beds.
Hello, says my voice
on the other end.
There's nobody home;
it reveals a truth I know.
A tone iced by time
and brittle as bone.
Bitter as a cold wind
that's kicked in
and cut the line.
It drops me. Knocks me
forward by forty years.
Fearful,
I smear the slow empty zero
of what I already know
across the phantom face
of my folk's old, red phone.
Tammy Robacker was Poet Laureate of Tacoma, Washington from 2010-11 and is a 2011 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence award winner. In 2009, Ms. Robacker published her first collection of poetry, The Vicissitudes, and also co-edited a Tacoma poetry anthology, In Tahoma's Shadow: Poems from the City of Destiny. Tammy's poetry has appeared in ColumbiaMagazine, Plazm, Floating Bridge Review: Pontoon, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and the Allegheny Review. Her poetry manuscript, We Ate Our Mothers, Girls, wasselected as a finalist in the 2009 Floating Bridge Press chapbook contest.
I am four years old
poking one digit in the O hole
of a new, red rotary phone.
Unafraid of what
I do not know,
I dial out
of our very first home
and leave my parents behind;
all alone. There,
where my father shaved
his foamy cloud cheeks
over the old pink sink.
Back then, when
my mother breathed in
the lavender-scented sheets
before she made the beds.
Hello, says my voice
on the other end.
There's nobody home;
it reveals a truth I know.
A tone iced by time
and brittle as bone.
Bitter as a cold wind
that's kicked in
and cut the line.
It drops me. Knocks me
forward by forty years.
Fearful,
I smear the slow empty zero
of what I already know
across the phantom face
of my folk's old, red phone.
Tammy Robacker was Poet Laureate of Tacoma, Washington from 2010-11 and is a 2011 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence award winner. In 2009, Ms. Robacker published her first collection of poetry, The Vicissitudes, and also co-edited a Tacoma poetry anthology, In Tahoma's Shadow: Poems from the City of Destiny. Tammy's poetry has appeared in ColumbiaMagazine, Plazm, Floating Bridge Review: Pontoon, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and the Allegheny Review. Her poetry manuscript, We Ate Our Mothers, Girls, wasselected as a finalist in the 2009 Floating Bridge Press chapbook contest.
