By Allison Grayhurst:
My mind is painted bright blue
like a pair of favourite jeans.
My belly is bread for thieves. Here
the crime awakens:
I drink from the eternal teat
of responsibility, from the lake
of suffering I must ignore
to breathe a steady rain, to scatter
my guilt amongst the weeds.
What happens when your all is nothing?
or when the truck runs you down seeing only
anonymous hairstrands and entrails?
Knowing love’s limitations,
like one knows the snows or the teeth
of an animal, is the tension that frees.
An enemy is at my table.
A horse is buried under American sands.
My heart it water:
It longs to quench the hot summer skin of sparrows.
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About Allison
Allison lives in Toronto with her husband, two children, two cats, and a dog. Apart from writing poetry, she loves to sculpt – working with clay.
Over the past twenty years my poems have been published in journals throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, and in the United Kingdom, including The Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Wascana Review, Poetry Nottingham International, The Cape Rock, Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry, and White Wall Review. Her work was also included in the Insomniac Press anthology Written In The Skin , while her book Somewhere Falling was published by Beach Holme Publishers, a Porcepic Book, in Vancouver in 1995.
On 3rd Feb 2012, one of her poems was read in New York’s Orchard House Café as part of a Parabola Magazine reading. Other recent places where her work has appeared includes, the current printed issue of Parabola: Alone and Together, Parabola, poetrymagazine.com; Fogged Clarity, Out of Our, Quantum Poetry Magazine, Decanto, Indigo Rising and Message in a Bottle Poetry Magazine
