Deborah allbritain

Down here in the southwest corner of temperate nights, woodrats shimmy

the bird feeder, dive under black ivy and weeds. So what if the rodents gorge.

The skid and shot of everything that happens here, glass moons like milk-

spray over the beaches, lifetimes of do-overs. No one was born here.

Devil winds off the Great Basin ignite San Luis Rey Downs. The Lilac fire,

which sounds almost lovely, Satan disguised in lavender. O Candy Twist,

Everlin' Woman, Sarah Sunshine, O Mr. Hockey, Dogertown, Malibu Vixen,

Packin' Heat, Sir Charmalot, Oughttobeking, a thousand lilies, O Baby Bruin.

In Peru 140 children and 200 baby llamas expose their 500-year-old-skeletons.

Dislocated faces smeared with red cinnabar, hearts dug out for sacrifice.

Santiago Canyon 1889, fire with a thousand flaming sheep in its eyes.

O sacks of threshed and unthreshed barley. I am haunted by beautiful dead horses.

The children were buried west, facing the sea, the baby llamas east, toward the Andes. 

Perhaps a peace entered them, even so? I worry about my sister's fears.

When I visit Sacramento, the bedroom window stays shut and locked. She knows

an escaped convict from Folsom prison will kill me with a Kamikoto kitchen knife.

Mateo, don't leave Guatemala for the U.S. border. They will stun-gun you

like a stray dog. The rats are ravenous. They scritch and gossip beside my lame dog.

One Chimu child skull, a 500-year-old rope leading to his llama, little immortal

souls, messenger to the gods. Why is the world burning? Tell my people.

My sister ordered a doggy life preserver in case the levee breaks. She

can't drive across bridges, walk under trees if there's a north wind.

What will I do if I outlive her? Mateo, I told you not to cross the desert.

Your hand bitten by a hog-nosed snake. Did you not know there is no antivenom?

Tonight it is reported that one child dies every ten minutes in Yemen.

I can't sleep, one mother says, tell them it is the end of the world.

In Fort Wayne there are no Teslas parked in front of the 99-cent store.

If you ask for tiramisu, they will tell you they haven't seen her.

Yesterday he said I still love you but not like I did. Southern California has no seasons.

Southern California has its reasons.

  Published in The Laurel Review, volume 53, Issue 2, 2020

No need for an appointment, crisis will erupt

without you, another loud melancholy.

Stop picking your skin, pulling hair.

Your mother would say stop that

you'll leave a scar. Stop that

you're going to go bald. Maybe I could

knit a floor-length scarf. Before chrysalis

always an anxiety, always a falling.

Jelly the dry, aloe the rough. Hold your thumbs

for one minute. Do fill out this questionnaire.

Here is a coloring book to distract, a simple

sky held up by trees.

Won't you band-aid instead?

Won't you stop doing that?

I don't want to alarm you.

  This poem appeared in Salamander, Fall/Winter, 2021

Take chrome for example, how it used to be a metal

you believed in, the sheen, polished

and holding things together. 

Maybe you should consider tin now, such as the pail

you've stuck your toddler-sized Christmas tree in.

Tin has a heart, maybe an oboe soul.

You could drink from a tin ladle, plant mums in a tin can.

It's more honest than platinum, less sacred.

Tin is what you give yourself.

Even corrugated slats poured with

rain chime sweetly beneath the old eaves.

Something in me clamors for solder,

two parts joined, though there would still be the chance

of hail, fat clouds of pewter. Little soldier, why 

didn't they tell you

that desire always begins with tin?

   This poem appeared in the Little Patuxent Review, 2020

It taps bird code on the front room window, flits

from the tea rose to the weather stripped casing.

I could be walking upstairs with laundry and he's tapping

or else bundled in afghans, writing at the walnut table,

and he's working so hard. Now there's a May rain

and I've planted myself like a sugar maple this side of

the glass. I'm trying as hard as I can to twig some crux

of message, there's the weight of grass, the dripping talk 

of trees, droplets on slow petals, a presage toward hope--  

Confused angel, who assigned you me, your insist, 

there are so many things I need to know, but maybe 

it's got nothing to do with me, maybe it's only 

a mate you drum for, but why this house, this window, 

this human in cold light, pausing to the sound of almost 

sorrow  and almost gathered, knowing there's something 

to be learned here, but what.

   This poem was published in The Dunes Review, Summer/Fall 2019

It's something you've meant to do now that you're alone.

Once you grew a horse from oak trees,

added the taste of escargot, shallot butter

and burgundy. You fed him on the Rue de Rivoli,

hoping your husband would put down his lug nuts

and tweeters, wondering why he hadn't heard

your Appaloosa kicking the floorboards,

counting oats under your mahogany bed.

It could be the cold moon tonight

that draws you outside in your robe and overcoat,

mucking around for the tin Christmas tree bucket,

almost French. It is in this moon-shaped bucket

that your mule deer will be grown, though

you have no idea how. Only that it might

be best to assemble him in the dark:

handfuls of nasturtium, twelve pounds endive,

brown mohair, standing water from the birdbath.

You pour a dead champagne and think how

childish it is growing a mule deer just because

nothing feeds you, nestles its animal content

against your skin. Why should you care anyway,

waiting for its struggling limbs, blueberry

lips coughing up night smoke. How will it recognize

the taste of your fingers, its own wick

of a body covered in ferns? How will it know

you're not going to hurt it?

   This poem was published in The Greensboro Review, Fall 2018

The first rain after the thankful finished,

you stare at wet leaves on the porch

trying to decide on a new furnace or a direct

flight to Paris. You weigh the importance

of each and in the end pick

Paris which is why the dog looks so cold curled 

up in couch pillows and two

quilts, why you've tied the strings of your hoodie

under your chin. Sorry, you whisper in her ear

and she blinks twice, dozes off like this poem

which has little to offer other than

its tiny hinge that snaps shut

in the last line. And you sweet Reader

are thinking what hinge and I'm simply too tired

to explain. Let's  just say anything

could happen now that I recognize my own chilled hands,

I could catch the train to Marseille, the long boat

to Avignon. The slow paring down needed

for a silver tray on the bedcovers pulled back,

no one who loves me, only the gesture of

a small Godiva on my pillow each night,

water churning or lapping near Viviers, the dark

banks shadowed but still glowing cognac, a steward

down the corridor screaming in French.

   This poem appeared in The MacGuffin, Winter 2021

Should I be talking to angels, the slender stone grey one

wedged in the unmown hill, cloaked in asparagus fern,

or the plaster of Paris white one with my mother's ashes buried

beneath it. I could unearth the box right now, check if she's

still there or else talk to doves, tell them how I hear myself

thinking, feel like a woman painted in a still life of things.

I've sugared my coffee with Arizona because I can never get warm,

my winter of alone, battered insides of chimes, like ice over the fields.

And inside this house of souvenirs, of muted color, is the poverty

of absence, of unpaid bills and dust, a mind playing tricks 

on itself. I've even dyed the hummingbird water blue if only to match

the chipped cheap polish of my fingernails. Later, I'll say to no one

it's five o'clock somewhere and then drink too much wine.

If I walk around the block right now instead of sleep,

I'm only following orders, Deborah do walk the dog like this,

but I'd rather keep to the yard and its square fences, place myself

under the quiet branches of the frame, angels and grass, grass

and angels, the gate rusting open.

   This poem appeared  in the Comstock Review and was awarded Special Merit by Maggie Smith, Poetry Judge for the 2018 Poetry Contest.