Kelli Allen has served as Poetry Editor for The Lindenwood Review and she directs River Styx’s Hungry Young Poets Series. Allen teaches in the MFA program at Lindenwood University. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally
Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books (2012) and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine Not Drowning (2017) was released by C&R Press, as was her latest, Banjo’s Inside Coyote (2018).
~*~
Myth talker, deer singer
-for Daniel Deardorff
It’s a descent, Danny. The archers only miss
before winter. You have gone into that within
so many times. And now that invincible core
steels the eyes from elk to guide the way
forward…
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A little
off the ears
my crucified
barber-
The more I sleep, the more there is of the future.
Absence spares no one.
Birth
keeps a record
of who
birth skipped.
Some history: The baby had heard of a quiet glacier searching Ohio for the lost belly button of nothing and so left us in God, the capital of Death.
Mom I am the third boy to finish my wolf. Mom the baby likes you when you’re eating. Mom the snow has picked the water clean. Mom Ohio. In the food you couldn’t help.
Its favorite movie is the wind. Its mother found its father waiting for a cat to die.
Is there no one to hold its mouth?
Even god is afraid of sex.
On tv, the baby guards a salt lick while wearing the crown of thorns as a belt. Outside the tv, a random sister pulls her thumbnail loose and a paper doll starts to breathe. The fish watches all of it through a hole in the fish.
