What now will become of me—who, today, finds no
anchor in the slipshoddiness of language. Nothing
to avert the curse of autumnal winds. Nothing
in this world to seduce or chronicle in a foreign
tongue. Nothing dancing on the rooftop. Nothing
drumming me back home. No polyrhythmic
tides washing me to shore. No grandiose flood
sent to trouble the waters, down here. No rescue
through the biblical blowhole of a large white fish.
No muse picking the locks on doors to rooms
where the keys have been missing for weeks.
A friend tells me, I could turn to jazz and wait
for a cool breeze or a dizzying blast of be-bop
unleashing a manic chain reaction of eighth notes
that zing and zip through the sky like a brass
wing’d bird, up and away I’d fly but
the truth of the matter is—I’d just as soon
get wine high than to risk Charlie’s horn hitting the wrong vein.
Allyson Horton is a native of Indianapolis, Indiana. She graduated from Indiana University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Butler University. Her poetry has been published in the anthology Turn the Page and You Don’t Stop! Sharing Successful Chapters in Our Lives with Youth and also featured in The Wabash Watershed a journal highlighting six Indiana women poets, Not Like the Rest of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, and most recently, It Was Written: Poetry Inspired by Hip Hop (Arcana Press). Her work will also be featured in the upcoming anthology: Brilliant Fire! a collection of literature on the life and legacy of Amiri Baraka. Her first book of poetry published by Third World Press, Foundation (Chicago, Illinois) will be available in 2018. Currently, she resides in her hometown of Indianapolis.