Poetry by Alison Hurwitz

      Rich Carstensen CC




Lichen Marriage

Decades on, we texture surface in a spray of tiny trumpets.
My algae threads your fungus in a symbiotic chord. 
Our story’s spored on pelts of moss, a patch of mulch, 
a rocky face we’ve painted rust and green and gold. 

Alone, I could thrive in salt water, yet you might die of wave. 
Together, we cohere. You and I combined can dine on light, 
two kingdoms merging, bringing forth amoebic stars. 
We can be dog-pelted, ruffled, bumped blue-green and 

silver-sheened with hail. We’ve seen our share of warts, rock pimples, 
even witches hair. Strange elements have river-traced our veins. Yet, 
with time, we’ve learned the way to neutralize what alters us: heavy metal, 
carbon, even sulfur (not that I’m implying anything). I want to say that

home’s the place you are: a branch, a rubber tire, abandoned cedar shingles, 
bones. We’re those that always find a substrate we can cling to. At times, 
you might kvetch and call me specklebelly. I might mention those crustoses, 
your old man’s beard. Yet even during times of gripes and broken days of egg yolk, 

the gravel throat of rock tripe, we get on with it- this work of growing. 
I love the way our fruiting bodies join, weave something strange and 
intricate. We trace the shapes of sunbursts, hammered shields- 
make of us an unexpected tapestry, a living quilt, a synthesis.

You and I have formed a thing as delicate as candle flame, 
uncanny as our pixie cups that quiver, filling till we brim 
with nimbus cloud and water, a canopy made miniature, 
a liquid mirror somehow holding sky.





Lattice

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house
-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Yes, your woven house lets in the wind.

Hurt will pinch and puncture wherever it gains entry. 
You cannot breathe without worrying the edge 
of weather: wild scoured sky, its bow and scrape, 
its soughed lament. Change will come, will infiltrate 
your gate, your fierce portcullis. Each cloud of 
circumstance could bash and break it open.

What will you hold? Will you weaponize the remnants 
of forced entry, taste your name a splinter 
into wince? If you touch the aftermath, I 
won’t lie to you and say it won’t be raw. Words may twist you
into bitterness. You’ve tried to ring the bell, to call 
for help, to climb the bristled rope 

too many times, dermis burned from sliding down. 
Your latticed basket’s come unwoven, frayed 
into forgetting what was braided there before 
that jerking pull, when you hummed at peace inside 
a green house breathing willow. Yet even beaten, 
bruised, your pulse remains, drum-thudding as you walk, 

a rhythm patterned back to you, chorus curved 
to echo in reverberating hills. On their slopes, 
pines and oaks and grasses whish, let fly their seeds 
into a sudden gust. Is this not the way of everything? 
See how these trees allow the wind to strip away 
their leaves. They raise bare arms in praise of letting go. 

Will you join them? Will you answer 
when your heart is shaken wakeful by 
the tremor of a shift? Go out into morning, 
where the creek plays its continuo, meandering 
downstream. You, too, can modulate

your life into another key. What if 
those interstices are not just empty
places, but soundholes made 
to let yourself sing freely? What if 
every pore is not just opening, 
but door?

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Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist and dancer who now finds music in language. Her poetry was nominated for Best of the Net in 2023 and 2024. Alison is the founder/host of the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Her work is forthcoming in River Heron Review, Rust & Moth, and Thimble Literary Magazine. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorial services, takes singing lessons, walks in the woods with her family, and dances in her kitchen. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com
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