Wes Montgomery
balanced his scales on the edge
of a blueblack thumb
Black rivers flow up
ward their magnificence |fret|
ting the dams ahead
Man, sometimes you got
to nudge the notes, only way
them blue ones gon’ budge
How can you not redefine
the only instrument you have?
“Straight No Chaser”
They have taken no
thing that was ours to begin
with including |blues|
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.