Poetry by Peter Allen

Zoetrope
There is a black sun
that steals across the afternoon
And clutches at the white one
with icy fire fingers.
I can see it when
the moon is in the way
and returns its borrowed light,
like my father’s face
when he sucked in the
clown I drew
and blew it out
as a cloud of
gray vapor.

Albedo
I. (outer poem)
Like many others
of my generation
I was not able
to transition easily
from sleep state
to waking.
My tormentors
from the world
of light
would abandon their
assumed forms
whenever I entered
the shadow,
shape shifting
back into the
monstrous aberrations
whose anthropomorphic
disfigurement
more distinctly
identified them
with the awful deformities
they embodied.
My parents became giant
spiders that encircled
our house with a web
only they could safely navigate.
Infinitely patient
they could remain motionless
but alert
for years a time.
Recording every tremor
of the web,
they registered its
relative level
of significance;
darting forth with
vampire mouths open
or remaining inert
accordingly.
The cache of
silk-cocooned zombies
bore testament
to their prowess,
blanched and desiccated,
hushed,
hung like wraith pupae
from the silver maples.
II. (inner poem)
In my fifty-seventh year
I sat by my mother’s bed
while the cancer slowly ate her.
She then lay sleeping
while I was awake -- hovering.
She invited me into her dream
where I met three women:
the mother, warrior, and wise woman,
distraught that the child
who was their charge sat
frozen in a block of ice.
I was asked to help
so I melted the ice,
absorbing its cold
into my hands.
This it turned out,
was the same ice
in which I
had been encased.

Scotoma
I.
I spent my life
chasing after the sun.
At the end of each
exhausting day
it would wink at me
as it disappeared
beneath a sky
of blue-gray clouds
that faded into black.
This daily reiteration
of failure
eventually insinuated itself
as a mantra of disappointment.
At the end of it all
an angel asked me
how I had used my life.
“I spent my life
pursuing a dream,” I said.
“And what dream was that?”
“That if I could incarcerate
the source of light I would
be able to free
my own shadow.”
II.
“Love is life’s sign,
and so I see
life’s only sign.”

Pedagogy
When I was five years old
a red-headed giant
lumbered into our town
and crushed every house.
Those of us who survived
began to rebuild,
constructing haunts
that resembled the
homes we lost.
Over time we mastered
the skills needed
to recreate our dream.
The hardest part though
was not the long
apprenticeship, but rather
crossing a narrow chasm
between our memory
of the catastrophe
and a treasure we had
buried in each other,
a journey of only
twelve inches.

Sequela
Like every other man
I was born with a
wound in one hand
and a knife
in the other.
With the knife
I tore apart
the flesh of others
and inserted in its place
a savage fear
that masqueraded as revenge.
With the wound
I displayed for all to see,
the cost then to myself:
the violation of my own
innocent flesh,
ripped apart by
the knives of others.
This sleight of hand
I performed
so I would never suspect
I had murdered myself.

Anamorph
I.
From where I stand
I cannot see myself properly.
I need the corrective lens
that dwells in you
to gain the advantage point.
II.
You protest that you can
supply only your own distortion.
But the task remains for us to
find and employ
this shared mechanism.
III.
Through this means we can convert
from what we are
to whom we are to become.
The corrective frame of charity
restores ectropy.

Cataract
My grandmother’s hands have blood on them;
the blood of men she strangled and disemboweled.
When I last saw my father she was cradling his head
in her lap and hollowing it out like a halloween pumpkin.
She looked like my mother then -- pulling my teeth out
with a pair of pliers in my grandmother’s kitchen.
But it was still her, stuffing a handkerchief up her sleeve
while my grandmother served his severed testicles
on bone china. The feast does not quell, but further inflames
her hunger. She looks up from her plate and her eyes alight on me.
Now I look like my mother and she looks like my father;
only this time I cut off my own balls and offer them to her,
as if the memory of life could engender itself.
I can see you now that you are no longer here.
Your presence overshadowed me and
prohibited the luxury of reflection.
So I think of you now that you’re gone
and recreate you as you were:
a shadow of my Self.

Charge
When the ravenous fear
devoured the last piece
of my heart
I felt my body
turn cold.
A great whale,
light years across,
entered the cavity
and swallowed me
along with a sea
of shimmering plankton.
The digestive process
was incredibly slow,
more one of calcification
than assimilation.
When it became clear
that no death
would ever bury
this awareness
I opened my own mouth
and began to swallow
the whale,
one tiny bite
at a time.

Scrimshaw
A sperm whale
entangled in a net of harpoons
thrashes against a feverish
nest of hunters,
outlining the story of
her last hours,
scratched into the enamel
of an extracted tooth.
You observe it from within
the sanctum of the hushed
and tired museum,
reflecting on the stories
of your own deaths,
now awaiting the pressure
of the engraver’s hand
against your teeth,
that others might apprehend
their delineation.

Haruspex
My father lies dead on the beach now,
strangled with my intestines
by the seething Atlantic.
I stuffed them back into the abdominal
cavity and stitched up the wound
with some fishing line.
That night a white porcelain beach ball
rolled up to my bed and said, “Swallow me.”
I obeyed the command, my jaws dislodging
like those of a boa constrictor that begins
to ingest the goat it has crushed.
The ceiling then exploded and littered my bed
with pieces of burning gypsum.
I went to a bottomless pool nestled in the
roots of the great ash in the back yard,
cut out my right ear and gave it to a carp
with silver scales.
In return I was shown an underground passage
that ran from the end of the world to an
ancient city that had been swallowed by
the ocean.
Emulating a sea serpent that coiled around the ruins
I learned to breath underwater and to extract
nourishment from poisonous jellyfish by
recreating them on a linen shroud.

Atavus
When my grandmother died
I began coughing up the bones
of my ancestors.
Like the tiny circus car that produces
an unending stream of clowns,
I became an inexhaustible source
of these knobby souvenirs.
Each bone bore the imprint
of the ones before it.
I laid them out in order
on the living room floor
and noted the diminishing
profusion of tattoos.
After fourteen years
I coughed up the first bone,
the one that bore no imprint.
This bone I held up to my ear
and it whispered to me
my own name.

Voluspa
A frenzied torrent of
army ants
build a living
bridge of bodies
across a dead sea.
It is sucked down
like a black web
that eats itself.

Harrow
My brain has knives
tucked away
in its convolutions.
With these knives
my brain carves out
a deep cavity
in my viscera
and plants a
dark idea of itself.