Poetry by Alixa Brobbey

    Henry Söderlund CC





Duck, NC

Because I love you: mascara.
Blush. Cotton-swished ankles. The beach
after sunrise. That first beer can,
then cap after bottle cap.

You want to sift this sandy stretch
before time’s marching swallows her.
So I am shoving plastic disks into this
blue helium star we rescued,                
this morning’s makeshift garbage bag.

Before I knew to love, I had to learn
to love, my brown eyes
blinking from my sister’s face.
And then to teach her to love,
ply her with milky pull tabs,
bejewel her with them,
call them kindness rings.

Girlhood wonder: how she still craved
my rings after she knew
I made them up, like 
crusted sweets, like poems, like hand
clapping games.

We were so small, and those mornings
so big: burnt toast & spilled milk.

And now those days swallowed
by so many bottles of milk, new silvery
spoons, tiled counters, hobbled stools.

All that’s left:
this bottle cap
damp in my hand,
how it binds me to
those plastic tabs, and now,
binds me to your boyhood 
beach, and to you.


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Alixa Brobbey spent portions of her childhood in The Netherlands and Ghana. She has a B.A. in English and J.D. from Brigham Young University, where she won the Ethel Lowry Handley Poetry Prize in 2020. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming in Rattle, Brittle Paper, Weber—The Contemporary West, Inscape Journal, The Albion Review, The Susquehanna Review, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.