Poetry by Allison Blevins & Joshua Davis

            Jonny Hughes CC



On Silence


Silence fills my empty spaces like neglect. I think of the ways
jealousy feeds two people—children standing under a tall table. 
How hunger waits in the parts so far from your belly you can’t remember
full or empty. How you eat pain to fill pain and the word pain
doesn’t touch the feeling. Language fails the way sound and color 
and food never do. How a single violin, the fade of purple to pink 
to blue, how potato chips have more to say than adjectives. If I were honest,
I’d explain this silence as cold next day chicken or pie from the tin,
fingers smeared with dip. Everyone tells me I’m not old enough
to hurt this way. I have something to say plainly, about violence,
something about rocking a child in darkness, something small 
here is choking on the silence, our country dusked in ash.





​​“And they came home and longed again.”
               from Elizabeth Bradfield 


They trade paperbacks: The Price of Salt and Dwelling Song. 
They write a poem, line by line, full of winter: terror of the homebound. 
They try to tie a prayer into clean cloth with a twist of string, 
the way some men string up rabbits for gutting. 
They paint their nails every day only to chip away at shine. 
They listen hard for silence but hear only babbling.
In the abandoned mall crumbling from root and frost, they
gather and wait. When the third grader spikes a fever, they wait.
Before they wade foot first into the waters, they sing for their lullaby mothers. 
They cry in the grass and gutter. No one comes. No one comes.
They send messages home in cracked bottles, across cans and twine,
and they long again and again against waves that push them back to shore.


​

Allison Blevins is the author of the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019).  Her books Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and Cataloging Pain (YesYes Books, 2023) are forthcoming.  She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and a Poetry Editor at Literary Mama.  She lives in Missouri with her spouse and three children.  For more information visit http://www.allisonblevins.com.

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A former John and Renee Grisham fellow, Joshua Davis holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi, an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, and an M.A. from Pittsburg State University. Recent poems have appeared in The Poetry Distillery, The Museum of Americana, and The Midwest Quarterly. He is a doctoral candidate in American Literature at Ohio University, and he lives near Tampa.

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