A town is just a town until it’s empty. Then, the echoes 
multiply, shadows brewing in every corner. Centralia, 
a mining town in Pennsylvania, has been burning 
from below since 1963. The houses and lawns 
fall into fissures in the earth, feeding a fire 
that cannot be quenched, claiming the streets 
and fire station, children tossing footballs 
in the yard, the browsing deer. The highway 
cracks and buckles and the trees turn white 
as bone. Tourists arrive by the busload, 
hoping to leave their mark on trees and houses 
belonging to no one. Archeologists of emptiness, 
they wander up and down the shaky staircases, 
following a flashlight’s beam, exclaiming 
over ancient coal-fired furnaces, while others 
spray-paint “FUCK” on front doors, rifling 
through the private lives of people who are dead 
or elsewhere, lives erased as thoroughly as gravestones 
when the names and dates have worn away. 

Robbi Nester

lives and writes in Southern California, where she is a retired college educator and an elected member of the Academy of American Poets. She curates two poetry reading series and is the author of four published books of poetry, including an ekphrastic chapbook, Balance (White Violet, 2012), and three collections: Narrow Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2019), Other-Wise (Kelsay, 2017), and A Likely Story (Moon Tide, 2014). She has four more manuscripts awaiting publication.

Her poems, reviews, essays, and articles have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including among others: Artemis; Book of Matches; Cultural Daily; Dear Vaccine: Global Voices Speak to the Pandemic (Kent State University Press, 2022); SMEOP (Hot) (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, forthcoming); Live Encounters; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Mindfull; Naugatuck River Review; Rhino; One Art; The Journal of Radical Wonder; Tiferet; Valparaiso Poetry Journal; Verse-Virtual; and Zooanthology: About the Animals in Our Lives (Sweetycat Press, 2022).

Robbi has also edited three anthologies: The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! (Nine Toes, 2014); Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees, which was published as a special issue of Poemeleon Journal; and The Plague Papers, recently published online at Poemeleon Journal.

Poet’s website: www.robbinester.net

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Dancing White Egret, ekphrastic poem by Robbi Nester after a photograph by Philippe Rouyer, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022)

⚡ In Memory, five poems by Robbi Nester in Live Encounters (August 2021)

⚡ Three Poems in Verse-Virtual (January 2020)

⚡ Law of Attraction, ekphrastic poem after Van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhone, in Verse-Virtual (May 2019)

⚡ Night Tunnel, ekphrastic poem after a painting by Robert Rhodes, Philadelphia Night Train, in The Ekphrastic Review (21 April 2016)