Poetry by Allison Hummel

galaxies and hurricanes



Untitled

My mah jong card is a blank
field of ice.

I am still
here.

Heard someone say:
I’m turning 60.
I’m going to write a novel.

                            I’m turning to glass.
              I’m going to write
a riddle.

                           What’s strange and
                           strangling and time all over?

What is me, what is us,  
unknown all over?

What’s to become of all this
turning-over? Sleeping
cold on a blow-up bed

I dream a high death count, my spinal
torque, my cloud covers:
I am turning to

water.

-Our globe collapses inward,
an anthill.

-A sucking sound denotes
these end times.

Will we                                       
                  
             p          s                       s     p                              p               s                       
                a          s                        s    a                               a        s                         
                   t    o                         o         t                                 to                      ?
                   hr                        r              h                             r       h                                
                c     s                      c                   s                    c               s


Will we cross paths? The tantalum mines are lakes
of red ore. The screen recognizes touch but

do I, and do I, and do I?

​



After Narkopop 7

I.

I read of ergot
in the belly, bodies
in the bog,

and a sad piano
conjures up some nothings, wisps
of ghosts, a flock
of gray cirrus clouds.

Suddenly, a baleful oboe.

How strange that a ghost can be
a glitching image on the internet
(i.e. Nicolae Ceausescu, stretched
and crunched by slow Wifi,
almost a bar code-)

and a ghost can be
the bag of a human form, ochre
with tannins

or a trapped anomaly
or a flutter of data


II.

I like it best when ambient
music sounds like my computer might
just be malfunctioning

and then a pattern introduces itself
and the soft circle of it
could draw me into sleep.

Briefly a moth dives into
my bra, then ascends, nothing
lost, no loss of powder on the wing.

I see it hover near my luminous screen.

The chasm
so vaporous
between human deed
and the afterlife of digitization

makes me feel like butter in
a hot room.


III.

Time like a vampire bat,
drains the life from life

renders things deniable
arguable or contested.

The phasing out of Helios
allows Apollo.

And the inception of new narrative
is old alchemy,

conscious animals
werewolved into bouquets
of information.

I struggle with my connection.
It keeps dropping

itself

but I hold the body
of the other

(from a distance,
allow fragility)

and I attempt to keep that vision
on my retina
stain of light and
smear of shadow

something to take with me
to antiquity

and its void,
conduit to the empty ocean

​



Untitled

I.

So much beautiful wind
I can hear it like shuddering
curtains or a cascade of liquid static

and the loose brushes of palm clatter
down. They rest where they fall.

A cold weather has persisted, and
we are all a bit bent at the middle

expecting movements of spirit or
a rash of ascendances,
or disappointments, the
falling short of decency.

I remember Alameda de la Pulgas,
and the symphony,
then the ensuing, calcifying
long skein of my time
which I followed here

to the museum:

the soft gloves at the museum,
and how, after, the hands feel strange
without them,

slightly cold, and vulnerable
something that was unborn and then born in a moment,

the way all things are born.


II.

I was writing a poem about
a bog mummy.
(I told this to Otto,
cor blimey he said.)

This before the
wet strangeness
of mouth on closed eye,

omen adrift and settling. A
preemptive healing touch,

which spoke of an abrupt
and extreme pain

that had not yet landed.


III.

I spent one night with Otto.
It’s not the kind of love I want
but it was a thick and viscous
love-- an apparition,
left my mouth numb


IV.

I swim around in the
bell of my solitude.

The emptiness of it,
the single bowed chamber,
is what allows sound.

I attempt a cohesion that is not
in my flesh or blood. It might
be another quick, silver fish

a line of light moving beneath
water,

wavering thread of longing that brings
the parts to wholeness

​



Untitled

Last of all a cup of tea and second to last a piece of apple cake
and third to last I brushed the cat, I think, all the way back

(b   a   c   k ←)          b

                            a

                            c

                                        k


to sixteenth to last, driving alongside strangely
uniform clouds, in a Styxian sky, past the
Ojai exit.

When Till and I were in Ojai we sat
on the picnic table, and around the same time,
discussed history in relation to
                                               some young people that never
                                               did anything terribly wrong.
            
“History is like the denouement
of a car crash. You observe it through the window
of a train in motion.”

I did not say this, but think it now.

When the train loses all propulsion, heavily
resting,

this is also history. Anyway it was
daytime, voluptuous sun, round
and lovely, first of all
it was the sun

and last of all it was the disconcerting fact
that all but one of my lights were out.

Now the Ojai exit, sixteenth to last, it’s
also history. History,        →      and the Romanovs are a tea brand, now.
I found the foil packet
at my grocery store, purple ivy.

​

Bio: Allison Hummel is a poet currently based in Southern California.

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