Poetry: Allison Grayhurst

Allison Grayhurst

Maelstrom

In preference

instilling

the conditions

of terror

Fly like a hen

across the field and back

to the barn

Could there be another dream

worthy of oiling or is there just

inactivity everywhere causing

grid-lock, prolonging depression and time spent

under the rafters watching the game?

I am somewhere identical to where I was before,

yet labouring under its own Academy - learning

the tricks, discerning the only essential tea

adequate to brew.

There is the other side to this

and I will get there 

without therapy or disintegration.

I will get there, intact, not a garment

soiled or torn.

***

Inertia Foiled 

I could speak ugly

like a suicide weapon

inflating misery into

a ballooned and final action,

irrevocable.

I could cry like I was begging -

one leg broken, both legs

unusable, cry in my rejection,

plead pity like a half-crushed 

ant.

I could hide in my comfortable spot,

refusing to move or to attempt a peering-out,

beyond 

my visible understanding.

I could stop and stop forever

but I can’t because

love is stirring, waking

ready to come down the stairs

and share a language, a trust 

that overpowers my sluggish mind-flow, 

tells me

I could just receive

and dedicate my purpose

alone 

to this sensation.

***

In the Bloodline

In the bloodline

like walls of lead

storing blockages like

clots and unlivable dilemmas,

the past is a monster

telling you what and what you don’t

deserve, beating on your brain

like on a dusty rug that will never

rid itself of mites no matter how hard 

it is hit, will never release

its stains, can only be thrown out, over

the rail, into the dumpster.

In the vital present, uncompromised by thought

and expectations, nothing is determined,

no fortune teller to foretell what doesn’t yet exist.

Gravity is a false witness,

a trickster in the fold, folding this into that

into complex patterns void of significance,

except as patterns to follow, analyze, get lost in

as a desperate hope for control.

But the galaxy is not gravity,

is affectionate, unpredictable, purer

than understanding.

Bloodlines are straight lines

that nature abhors.

Ignore common enemies,

blow out the candles, blow,

arousing the birthing pulse 

of a strange and glorious logic.

***

What Do I Belong To?

I waited like a face

before a mirror

waiting for expression,

waiting for an answer to carry me through

until mealtime.

I washed the clothes, did all things

necessary to keep clean and fertile,

to rejuvenate and knead out the numbness

infiltrating one limb and another.

I asked like I was instructed to ask,

grazing at every opportunity, in spite 

of the lack.

I moved against the shadows so they

wouldn’t consume, making every effort

not to harden, to curtail

this statis that will turn to sickness and

turn again to death.

I am waiting for a reaping

in this favourite place 

I call my own, so I can build upon,

have a steady flow to satiate all thirst, 

have breathing room to flesh-out dreams -

some prayed for, some unexpected.

***

Peel

Orange peel

peel away my

heartless woes,

condemn again

the general rule

and allow the lotus 

to bloom.

Remarkable day

that snatches away

the mystique from the mystics,

horseback rides to the summit

then descends at high velocity,

never losing ground or footing.

Power in my mind, I trust what I believe,

finally not fooled by the artificial

or displays of unquestioning confidence.

Finally my hope is tied to my faith.

I squeeze the fruit and smile in amazement

as I taste its intoxicating droplets,

let them pool in my mouth,

sensually reviving, loosen the grip

then drink.

***

Bio: Allison Grayhurst has been nominated for “Best of the Net” five times. She has over 1400 poems published in over 530 international journals, including translations of her work. She has 25 published books of poetry and 6 chapbooks. She is an ethical vegan and lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com

---

Setu, March 2024

Poetry: Allison Grayhurst

Allison Grayhurst

Cardinal

We walked beside the wall
on a grim February afternoon.
Our lips parted wanting to speak,
but words grazed the soundwaves like
ghosts and our hearts sank.
We walked together, over logs of rotted wood,
through slush puddles, avoiding snowbanks
and icicles dangling from high trees, beside the wall.

This is love, you told me, and I knew it to be true.
I grew tired and you linked our arms. You grew despondent
and I looked into your eyes like looking at a flower.
The winds turned on us. Family dug ditches of judgment
around us, expecting our downfall.

The cardinal arrived, leading the way, navigating
us through – stopped on a wire while we rested, called at us
to turn a corner. Around that corner, holding hands,
the wall disappeared.

Our hair damp with snow, our gloves ripped
at the fingertips, we sat on a neighbourhood rock, in a yard
where nobody was home. The cardinal left when a stranger
appeared. You helped me up and we continue on

houses all around us, children going to school, and us together
inseparable, strong in love, stronger than the hard hard world.

Stream of Dark Nectar

It does not end today, in the morning, in
these sapling hours of blissful solitude.
It could end and be a bone, dried and crushed
by the pressure of circumstance – but the
veil has lifted. Jesus speaks his anarchy
and raises the grass strands, blooms the flowers, swiftly,
miraculously with perfect sense before my eyes. King
of time and gravity – the weather listens to him, the water,
coins and food all bend to his majesty and authority.
I watch this like I would a landscape sunsetting sky,
vast across forever and wide as the sea.

Cards are in my hands,
they have living pictures, moving in sacred gestures,
gathering force, corresponding with bird conversations,
rising in crescendo, defending in their equal chaos
and innate harmony. One tree opens its branches.
One child remains.

This morning I see upright, shed
what was never mine to own.
Jesus is near like the beauty of eternity, sitting
across from me, touching my knees then holding my hands.
Power that is peaceful and velvety soft as it is
a black hole of mystery, infinity contained.
This morning God is strongest,
cutting the threads of mortal memories, leaving
only the imperishable wind.

Bountiful

The vanishing sequence,
removed like a ghost from
the body whole, now whole
and no longer leaking out
toxic bile of directed hatred
or the spirit-force leaking,
weakening the core, extending
to the appendages. Contained,
aura sealed as it was in the beginning even before
this body, this birth, dreaming in temporal form.

There are no enemies and no significance in battle zones
or winners – it is just a shedding of skin, dead cells
turning into dust, whisked away by a sweep and a soft blow,
a light breeze from a window open, opened,
all parts collected into a singularity. Faith in
the sidewalk turn, in the emptying.

The conquering darkness is placed in a storybook, a tale of long ago
that holds to personal sorrow - raw chafing bonds
of bitterness and regret. Fears become detached,
become a horse in an open field, unclipped from his halter and lead.

It is stronger than charity because
there is no giving, no division
between what is given, what exists and what is received.

It is a dried curled leaf, opened -
the colour cracks and crumbles, its flesh like confetti,
gazed at in awe, dropped and lost, vanishing in luscious folds,
beneath high grassy ground.

Setu, February 2018

Allison Grayhurst

Allison Grayhurst

Drove Me Down

By your mercy
the stone was thrown
that drove me down.
By your love
I catapulted
into the ditch,
and am still there.
By your freedom,
my faith was bound
and the rivers
outside
have soured.
By these things
my table was set and my ankles chained.
I see no way to be removed
but by your mercy
after the stone was thrown.

Pilgrimage

Eye to eye
like a phantom facing the sun,
I will face the actuality of maggots
and numb extremities. I will not
be secret or grip my soul in spiritually
adolescent platitudes that provide answers
without truth. I will be under the heat
that compresses my lungs and shrinks my skull,
half drugged with fatigue but not poaching
the mourning dove for a brief taste of satisfaction.
This day will not be my enemy. I will learn to climb trees.
I will learn to wait, high above ground,
wait for the release of my fears.
When I climb down, in the wild grass, for a moment
I will lie down, stretch, and then, continue on.

Our Love

The salted lips,
the husky sea and the atonement
of death, I called you my tale
of the bull horn and familiar voice.
Crack through the corn cobs, through
the years that seem to spell-up without
answers or digestion. But you and I,
by heaven’s chapel and heaven’s cattle
left to graze, unkilled, we are sparrows
after a summer rain, blind still, but finding
shape in our children, and in and by the doorways
we have and have not conquered. We are
the mantle where crystals breathe their energy, and
we are the same as twenty years ago, having only
each other in this place of senseless oblivion, having
what others always long for, rich together
and forever as midnight.

Table of Contents, May 2017

Poetry by Allison Grayhurst

Allison Grayhurst

The Clothes We Wear

Fall down and recognize
the river and its reaching sway.
Solitarily suited between what you gave
and what was refused reception.

Born on a balcony, hung over the rails -
so much work, so much love needed to
make it work. And then you grew up
and needed only a dark room to hide in,
the reproach of some sages and
the occasional charity.

Then your fire-ball bouquet of demands,
squealing and giggles drew blood and the rain
got stuck in the sky as the angels misplaced
your destiny. They cannot get it back –
some have tried, most have not even bothered
as it was fed into the ocean, swallowed up
by primordial beings, ancient, not used
to sunlight and heaven.

They swim through pressurized underwater caverns,
carry it stuck in their gullets, only to be released
when their centuries-old bodies give way to compost. Then
maybe a holy voice will hear it cry out, bubble to the surface
and claim its place back inside of you. Maybe, in that time
you will give value to the hallelujah
that fireworked through you when you first came here –
from another place, high up, but strange and dark too
as the ocean’s floor.

If there is anything open

I will return
from infinite dying
and the conscious swallow.
I will say – I will not want,
be a daughter of the root and caterpillar climb.
If there is anything worth keeping
I will keep it on the kitchen table
feed it blueberries, honor its language,
and biology.

But if is only echo, tell me clearly
so I can shut my eyes, turn and open them
elsewhere, find joy in sweeping the stairs
or typing in a mantra – all night, humming without erratic
fire or appetite. If my hands are only hands, let them
be clean, ungrasping, useful, in other ways, holding out
to offer, to receive, surrendering
bread, the stone, a smile.

Say good, say goodbye

Bright in the box in the cupboard
where the keepers of conscience and trivia
highjack the pacing depths
to replace it with an easily peeled-off
sheen. It is time to bloom,
to say goodbye to books and playballs of requisitions,
decoding philosophy and revelations in tune
with taking a stance.

Death, I am a robin’s feast with
dandelion breath
stalling at the toddler tree
worshiping what is yet to bud.

Death, you made me confused, me,
the revealer of the signs,
mountain-top screamer, fencer for
a fourth-dimensional world.

Flat rocks in a circle, gulls circling
one graveyard, spot
of significant mourning. Faint lines.
But God is solid, exact, without
need of interpretation. Death
is only a layer reached
and removed, when traveled
then traveled through.

Table of Contents, October 2016

Allison Grayhurst

Bio:
Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Three times nominated for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2015, she has over 850 poems published in over 380 international journals. She has twelve published books of poetry, seven collections, nine chapbooks, and a chapbook pending publication. She lives in Toronto with her family. She is a vegan. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com

            Some of the places her work has appeared in include Parabola (Alone & Together print issue summer 2012); Elephant Journal; Literary Orphans; Blue Fifth Review; The American Aesthetic; Agave Magazine; JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, Drunk Monkeys; South Florida Arts Journal; Gris-Gris; The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry, Storm Cellar, morphrog (sister publication of Frogmore Papers); New Binary Press Anthology; The Brooklyn Voice; Straylight Literary Magazine (print); The Milo Review; Foliate Oak Literary Magazine; The Antigonish Review; Dalhousie Review; The New Quarterly; Wascana Review; Poetry Nottingham International; The Cape Rock; Ayris; Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry; The Toronto Quarterly; Fogged Clarity, Boston Poetry Magazine; Decanto; White Wall Review.

Authors A-Z