2 Poems by R. A. Allen

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Blood Poisoning 

Eight generations of matriarchs

declared her the black ewe

in our lineage. And even from

a trunk in the attic, Aunt Nina’s

stare follows me like a war recruitment

poster, forecasting my genetically

determined guilt from behind

an oval of glass in a walnut frame.

Little Rock, Arkansas. 1908.

We don’t need another like her, says

my mother. Let her be a lesson to you. 

Aunt Nina, drug addict.

Aunt Nina, maker of poor choices.

Weak DNA on your father’s side.

What else would explain her leaving

the Church to take up with a Marxist?

Blood will out, mother says.

You left the Church.

You have her eyes.

Escapism

When I was down, they put me in seg,

 for my own protection they said.

My cell’s windowsill was higher

than a man could jump. My view was

of a plane extending into space.

The bars were rules directing

me to concentrate on the emptiness 

between vertical flatness 

and illusionistic depth. My imagination,

deprived of normal spatial references,

raked the bars like James Cagney’s

tin cup. Eventually, as a stateless mind

in a zero state, I launched my way out

into breathable spaces.

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R. A. Allen’s poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, RHINO, The Penn Review, B O D Y, Alba, Cloudbank, Orbis Quarterly, and the anthology Celestial Musings. He has nominations for The Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net 2020. His fiction has been published in The Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and Best American Mystery Stories 2010, among others. He lives in Memphis, a city of light and sound. https://nyq.org/poets/poet/raallen

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15 August 2022