Kelli Allen
Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. She has served as Poetry Editor for The Lindenwood Review and she directs River Styx’s Hungry Young Poets Series. She is currently a visiting professor of English Literature at Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China.
She is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. 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. Her latest collection, Imagine Not Drowning, was released by C&R Press in January 2017. Allen’s new collection, Banjo’s Inside Coyote, will arrive from C&R Press April, 2019.
www.kelli-allen.com
“We all know water promises weight to carry our grief, pulsing, further and still further away. The cave is something else entirely. Its promises are the sharp moments of sex we insist frighten us when anyone asks us about love, but which we secretly desire above all faint and feathered touch. The prince always knows this and turns again and again away from his beloved when she becomes too tender. He is looking for the opening where the egg rests unharmed. Yes, memory is velocity solidified and molded into something with hooves and breath. We must be careful where we let these creatures run—to granite or sea.”
“If the egg splits, its sides falling open just enough for the fuzz-capped head of the child to emerge, then the story might be allowed to end. When the egg is found crushed, wet pieces tucked quickly into the open mouth of the tree, then we have little choice but to begin again. Often, after peeking through loose fingers held as wings over our eyes, we look for fragments, hoping they remain piled, split and sharded, not growing, as magnets, back together.”