noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer they would like to bring
to the readers' attention.In this issue, Allison Blevins is highlighted.
The voice in the poems of Allison Blevins whispers in your ear and says listen: "I see your face like this: the silhouette of your brow / and nose, a bird and also a rumble like an engine". It's a tough voice but one that can risk transparency: "Please, once in a while, fill my hands / with wet leaves, with wet leaves and a roar." It's a voice you trust, a multi-faceted voice in which you will believe: "One day, her lips will mouth yes automatically. / To be female is to be raveled, your whole life".
I Try To Explain Poetry To My New Wife
Evening News
In My Bedroom
The Vocabulary of You and Me
Who Owns the Mountain
Call of the Void
From My Box of Tangled Memories
Rage
Turn Your Face
What It Feels Like To Unravel
I Try To Explain Poetry To My New Wife
This poem is about you. Here you are
golden. Here is a field. This is a road always
beginning. It just is. I know your fear
says something like this: I love you more
than you love me. Do you remember
that day you changed your oil in our driveway?
How you used your shirt to wipe away the black?
How you know the exact names of every part
and the perfect spot to place a jack? Poems can be
like that. Here you are a whisper, leaves clapping.
Here you are color again. Blue and orange.
Here you lean into the engine perched on one leg.
I know that the image is more bird than you.
I see your face like this: the silhouette of your brow
and nose, a bird and also a rumble like an engine
starting and starting but never ending.
She tells me a man on the evening news is singing.
He is singing off key. His singing is everywhere.
His voice etches the story in blackening clouds, lines
and angles. She tells me this story is too complicated
to remember. Most of her memories walk a path winding
through darkness not even a song told by violins
could describe. She can’t just say the words brown or sand
or earth. She tells me one memory waits for her
every night after the sun evaporates, when the sky is lit
as if electrified by a magnesium flash. She tells me she remembers
mostly distance, how a finger once trailed a line between
her breasts, how most paths lead two directions, how
when the singing stops we are alone. Not even her boots
or the promise of some voice ahead of her brings comfort.
I fear this woman and I will be crushed beneath plaster and beams,
crushed by doubt. Dust will weep onto our lashes.
Windowless, every room is hushed of wind. My body
wordless as her footsteps. She never takes off her boots.
I tell everyone I’m falling with her.
Youth has smoothed her face of crackling.
You are like air whispering. Let’s stay in this bed forever.
Let kindness lash us into pulp. We are brave
and believing. If the posts of her arms hold
up my body, it will be enough.
We tell each other lightning is water so in love
that the coming together sounds like shuddering.
I fear the coming apart. Silence & curling.
Let’s walk backwards through the story.
The first time I write us, I take breath
into my lungs as a meal. You are the future
I’ve not yet learned to whimper.
All I know about memory
is that strand after strand falls,
fills the spaces around the furniture as a ringing
at night, a bell that vibrates, scatters silence
waiting like alcoves in freeway cliffs.
We are polite. Us. I tell you ok. Okay.
I write the words again. Again. I want
to wash my face. I want to brush my teeth.
This is just the beginning. And already.
How do you carry a heart? Does it fit in your mouth? Lodge in your throat? We’ve seen roadside grottos, white crosses abandoned like garbage, like discarded dead. We’ve traveled between sun and shade, watched water slowly gorge the land and urge us to an unknowable center. I once held a woman in my hands, my fingers pressed deep in her flesh. We’ve left pieces of ourselves in gas station bathrooms, washed the chunks down stained drains. We’ve watched the ragged skyline fade in our rearview mirror, watched houses and waffle joints reappear and multiply. We’ve wished Tennessee was Kentucky, wished Kentucky was Missouri. Is the mountain a warning? We’ve felt our breath sink deep at the emerging precipice, tried to fool our body into believing death isn’t a memory we secret away, water frozen in a crevice.
The leap is like a starving become
full and kind. I was wasted on you.
Time tethered us both to a loneliness
that pulled and pulled the pink
from our flesh, the gloss from our teeth.
I'm learning a version of happiness
without you that sings
off my tongue. I'm learning other bodies,
the down of a woman’s arm
reminds me there’s value in my breath.
I’m learning the void in my lungs,
the void pours from my body
every moment reminding me how to fall.
From My Box of Tangled Memories
After Joan Mitchell’s Ici, 1992
Fill my hands with patches
of hide, smoothed bits ground
and downy, left on bark and fencing.
Fill my hands with the first green
(a breath, a step, a kiss), the frost
browned tips I want to call brave.
Fill my hands with small hairs
and skin scraped from my father’s
face, cheek pressed against forehead.
Fill my hands with metal, the bitter
tang of rails, my feet heel-toeing,
my arms floating my body above the track.
Fill my hands with tingling like worms
on my face, lost breath from my chest,
my chest vised by unfounded fears.
Tell me I’m a coward. I’ll keep searching
for you until the lines on my palms disappear.
Fill my hands with a bird. Inside the bird,
a bird. Inside that bird, a girl with sirens for hair
and flashing blue and orange where her mouth
should be. Please, once in a while, fill my hands
with wet leaves, with wet leaves and a roar.
After Joan Mitchell’s No Daisies, 1980
I’m swimming in your blues, Joan:
cornflower, bluet, pansy. I have no face
in the mirror. Green has seeped from my ears,
washed itself in wide swaths across
my forehead and mouth. My hair has greened.
My hair escapes in thick chunks to the tile.
Joan, soon I will be patches. What is this burden
of estrogen?
Until we met, I felt the blue
twinging my chest as fear. Rage is better.
I walk into every room as an empty vessel.
I’m sweating blue from back and arm pits.
My children, Joan. How will I tell them?
Turning and turning, my body learns to carry
on. I want to ask about the human soul.
If you tell me anything about how shadows follow
but never hold our feet, if you tell me anything
at all to do with the slouch of a child’s face, I’ll know
only pity. My body falls apart. Turn your face.
Surely everyone knows metal rusts, powders all that lies
underneath. Surely we all feel our flesh loosening
as the stones spin their slow plates
in the strange and rocking spaces beneath us.
I don’t know how to connect the earth to my body. Turn.
I want to ask about the human soul. I suspect my body,
veined and obscene, my body, vast and strangled by the hooks
of sleep and darkness, speaks all anyone might speak.
If I can give myself anything, let it be
a way into anger, into unraveling. To be
female is to be raveled, your whole life lived breaking
your flesh slowly apart, every word you speak
a loaded gun with no trigger.
Imagine a woman’s voice singing
like a violin. Imagine the plaintive oh
in the hinge of your knee
between cartilage and cap, synovial fluid
vibrating. Imagine teeth grinding at night,
tires drifting over the sleeper lines, bone against bone
the rhythm of unraveling.
Imagine a simple cadence,
people begin clapping, as if living outside the beat
is unbearable, each of us a ripped page. Heartbreak
is the sternum trying to crack from the cage,
to unravel. Push two fingers deep
into the breast, try to numb the sensation.
One day, my daughter will spoil:
my inner voice will become hers,
we will collect our female thoughts together
like daisies—I am ugly. I am flawed.
Imagine daughter as commodity,
something raw. Imagine a factory
constructing washers or brads or bearings.
Imagine anything manufactured. When my daughter
says yes, she will mean it but not understand.
We pass our memories through our DNA.
One day, her lips will mouth yes automatically.
To be female is to be raveled, your whole life
breaks your flesh slowly apart.
Allison Blevins received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has appeared in such journals as Mid-American Review, the minnesota review, and Nimrod International Journal. She has been a finalist for the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and the Moon City Poetry Award. Her chapbook A Season for Speaking won the Robin Becker Prize and is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press this fall. Her chapbook Letters to Joan is forthcoming from Lithic Press in 2019. She lives in Missouri with her wife and three children.
