2 POEMS
Orion Allen
EMPTY HOUSE
Empty House
| still a house for bats. The cockroaches who loved us left to find us, leaving behind footprints, dried scraps, mounds of their mounted dead now cupping pools of guano. At breakfast, every one of us is one of us. |
Stepping Quietly Out of Sleep
| to hear near a wharf, salt wind beating, sea lions somewhere. I search for them—climbing with uncertain hold on slick rocks—to hear here—fork clinks. Every day one thing moves me. It's waiting. |
I'm an Old Hose
| wrapped like a constrictor around my own memory. |
It Has No Unity
| The sea lions' mouths are still pink. Even if unseen the gaping house sits empty. Still padding these halls in the morning light falls. Still hear barking. |
Only Geese
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DOCUMENTARY, 2003
1
| Someone says salt and butter or maybe salt and buttery. My father asks if we could pass the bread not very nicely. My mother sat on her calves all morning scrubbing. We had been awake most of the night. |
2
| My mother stretched out her arm so we could lay down our heads. Today the bottoms of her feet are dirty. My sister says we should have stopped him, protected the woman who all night was howling. But we have never seen him. We don't know his face. |
3
| How do I not know how, fifteen years down the road, through the warm parts, any gravelled juncture, among the neon options of taste and smell, in deep mouth, having lived freely in plastics and home, how do I not know how. |
4
| That howling woman was also my sister. A solutioned silence takes. We didn't know his face. |
5
| Some words are too terse or else too open. It's my mother who wraps the slice on my finger in a towel. There's a silence that has been solutioned. That holds. |
6
| It doesn't fit in my mouth. What has happened in the dark. What can happen to a person. Botty battery. Boddy buddery. I still don't know. |
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Written in a parked car by moonlit smokestacks on a winter night in Iowa. See: blue screen of death, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Período Azul, Awful Dreams by Lightnin' Hopkins.