Possessed by Place
Winner of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry, ‘Leather wraps both our shoulders, and I will call you my lungs, my falconer, guidepost’ by Kelli Allen wowed final judge Renée Sarojini Saklikar. As she told us, “I read this lovely poem as a sonnet with its fourteen-line construction and those interesting, rhythmic two-line couplets cascading a series of stories in image. Wonderful!”
This magnificent poem appears in Issue 20, Autumn 2018, on sale now, until the end of March!
Leather wraps both our shoulders, and I will call you my lungs, my falconer, guidepost
We have swallowed the whole field. Tell me how to discover shovels
leaning less still, their names for metals happening later, closer to dusk.
I would give you buildings on fire, barn house doors ashed to moss, if you threw
one hand into the pond, pulled windowpanes back to shore. I know every moment
you tighten the other palm around horses kept miniature in my pockets. Our bodies
often possessed by place, fit one into the other under stained glass, borrowed warm.
Kingdoms don’t need context to nestle further against hillocks. I have been writing
our story to measure how underwater, my mouth holds your throat softer, legs
untangling in the last chapter, waking our firebird too late. That past is image over
image is no accident. Your jaw aches through each night and October rains anyway.
The doe is a widow. We see her cross one hoof too rough into woodpecker nests
fallen before anything autumnal pronounced an hour for grief, or for sleeping.
Eventually, we accept stars’ light as distance side-by-side. Abundance is forgiving,
is the carpet under my knees, and your chin dawn-lit, eyes closed against everything.
For your copy of ‘Leather wraps both our shoulders’, and for more from Issue 20, on SALE now, visit the bookstore.
Calling all poets: Now’s your chance to soar!
Enter the 2023 Magpie Award for Poetry by April 15th for your chance at $500 and publication in Pulp Literature.
For all the details, and to enter, visit the contest page.
Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. Allen is a co-founding editor of Book of Matches, a literary journal. She is an award-winning poet, editor, and dancer. Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. And How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her collections include, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, (2012), Imagine Not Drowning, (C&R Press 2017), and Banjo’s Inside Coyote (C&R Press 2019). Allen’s latest book is Leaving the Skin on the Bear, (C&R Press 2022). She currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. Her poem ‘You don’t know your life anyway’ appeared in Pulp Literature Issue 17, Winter 2018. Visit her at kelli-allen.com.
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