D. Allen

Meet me in the garden

at the start of the

          season when the magnolia is just
beginning to bloom. The raspberry brambles behind the house are
          vivid with leaves—    
 the cedar, green all along, doesn’t begrudge the forsythia
          its alchemy—    
 there is no blight, no waterlogged soil, no sun-starvation, not yet,
          there is still time.
 Let me be clear: I do not want to love you in a world without
          winter,
 I would not know how. But here I remember to
          undo the knotted roots
 of seedlings so others may flourish. Alive among monuments, we
          kiss
 without checking the clock. Here, even alone, I can see your face in
          my hands,
 your blue dimensions. Above the vines and wildflower beds our
          broken bodies
 tower over us, carved in stone, veined with mosses and lichens,
          no longer
 ours. They are quiet. Relieved of the duty of
          holding.

---

magnetic resonance imaging
resonant magnetic imagining
imagining magnetic resonance
magnetic imaging resonates
resonating images magnetize
images resonate magnetism

Inside the white chamber I am a flat
quiet surface waiting for transformation
 
Slid pale and papered into a center of
sound a vortex of quake and hammer
 
A body become fret board truss rod
bridge strings tuner pegs and skin head
 
Here there is space for one plus a thin
blue line dividing the sky for company
 
Blazing meridian it begins to shiver as
the shaking clanging becomes louder
 
Electric eel friend I cannot hold you
any longer in my field of vision blink
 
In the closer quarters of closed eyelids
even intimate night’s divided by bright
 
Narrow stripe embroidered in perfect
light onto the hem of the soundscape
 
The technician offered a soundtrack
of my choosing to cover the banging
 
But no now I am the outraged radio
the body clamoring the body in uproar
 
If the tendon is going to tear I want to
hear it I want to hear it
                                                        loud

---

We were going to build a dark room

but this never came to fruition
 
We can’t bring ourselves to leave
this house of unimaginable light
 
not since we woke to find our arms
green and rustling
 
one morning after a bender
our bodies that had curled inward
 
now pressed wildly against windowpanes
appetites vacant, simplified
 
In the Before we rushed
to draw black curtains
 
we prayed at the night’s
charcoal altars (please show me
 
the wholeness of my own self)
we loved the way we melted
 
into each other, how our edges blurred
without the day’s harsh contrast
 
Nothing is green in the dark
and we are now experts
 
on green, or our skin
(if you can still call it that) is
 
We were going to build a dark room
but instead you are holding
 
the hacksaw while I steady
the ladder
 
slicing back ceiling and roof shingles
to expose the summer sky




--
D. Allen is a queer poet and multidisciplinary artist living in Minneapolis, MN. They are a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA program, a recipient of the 2017 Minnesota Emerging Writers’ Grant from The Loft Literary Center, and a 2017 Lighthouse Works Fellow. D.’s work has recently appeared in District Lit, Connotation Press, Lockjaw Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. Their current project examines the inner life of a queer, disabled, genderqueer body through the lens of grief and intimacy.