Kelly Allen
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Border Loves
Let us thank the hells beyond these turflit halls as we dig and delve. Drag in the fallen moon for a nightly interrogation. Boxed shut by a starving mind, a door is brined by the burn of neon; will the light to speak.
Let us herd creation and ruin past the godlike gaze of the wandering, the confused. Abandon everything, the lot—dwell among the animals, spooned front to back, they dream their caves of heat. Blind the walls, ring them tongueless and true.
Let me remember laughter, the belly and the song. The breast shivers and shrinks. Nerves and edges, cliff-dwellers are we all. We find ourselves in the face that forms from the pooling surface of our breaths. Blood or light, what does it matter? Bring the walls down.
The tongue is guttered like a wind-shot flame. The tongue is digging. It quarries, it preys. The face flutters and dreams. Edges is all we are, we find each other in the habits we discard, they are old and dear inhabitants.
Mountains are not a road. These children are not the ones that I had lost. The hell I left behind was a desert, Derrida and Bordeaux. Now, my walls are made of grass, a tidal pool of turf. Straw tongues. A moth burns words as through a woolen rag. Dig and delve.
Creatures dragged to the side of the road. Their shadows close on me, guarding the fury of my anklebones, the flagging whatnot of my skin. I stand at your surface, entranced, measured, with a line of chaos. I hold no other narrative—not even a boat.
Where did you come from? So many have died. “So stand over me and finish me off for I am in agony and barely alive.” Oh ye tongues, drum me on home. I will give up a kingdom for salt. Jackdaws and ravens, find your resting place. Not one of me is absent.
Let us keep on the pilgrim highway. In cross-examining the moon, say, steal no more than you need: a fork in the road, the lot that no man should land in. Say, I am wool. I am the moth eating up the wool.
pulse
sumac leaves rowed slowly to the ground she took it as a sign
the way a warmed-up cup of tea set on a cold formica table
loses heat and mushrooms deprived of light learn to glow in the dark
you know disorder reigns
she wore her jeans through at the knees the kitchen light
pulsed blue and cold through the table chair
through mandelstam’s dead bees days parted
from one another root by root the silence
buzzed hot inside the hive a world hung languid in the sumac tree
she stopped speaking sex cries prayerful tongues
once anchoring the night stopped all of it and rode
the withering crawl of winter to the gut
she fed on willow-bark survived
to early spring when black-tails goshawks chased
her shadow gleeful over the fresh-turned fallow field
she had plowed it with an old boar’s head buried the skull
inside a cave but the field remained dormant though the sumac leaves
greened and silence no longer buzzed within the hive
she climbed out of her skin
and walked with a man across her field found the boar’s head
it would not stay buried considered the skull its fallen grin
the man’s quiet promises soft leather of his skin
meanwhile the sumac reddened bees turned to their hive
she burned the tree for honeycomb found mushrooms
moon-white heads balding bright so she let herself go
an owl screeched the field on fire fell into the cave
where water flowed (the world would not stay buried)
blackening the cavern floor mineral salt phosphoresced
ceiling to wall for everything must have an edge that lives
she bartered with the man gave him honeycomb chanterelles le pain
sauvage and salvia for scraps of red in leaves the solitary bell
of breaking glass inside the cave a little light remained
long slender fingers pale but good for more than words rode hard
and reckless beneath her skin the way light travels
trapped in rain
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Born and raised in the Puyallup River valley of Washington state, Kelly Allen lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her partner and their young daughter. She teaches writing and literature in the Comprehensive Studies Program at the University of Michigan. Her work has been awarded, among other prizes, the Hopwood Major Prize in Poetry and the Meijer Award. A chapbook, “Woman in a Boat”, chosen by Robert Creeley, won the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets Chapbook Series in 2004. Poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Verse, Arts & Letters, Rivendell, Oleander Review, and elsewhere.