Allison Hummel is based in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her work has recently appeared in Gasher, A Velvet Giant, The Cabildo Quarterly, A Glimpse Of, and other journals.
Regarding her work, Allison says: "I would like for my poetry to feel like somebody is telling the story of a small moment in time."
Mortal Weekend
The ground might rise
beneath you, like bread.
Things might descend
to meet you, as if
borne by the voice
of somebody very tall.
I might wish I had one
mortal weekend,
things like laundry
and coffee and ramen,
the dreamt-up shape
of Otto on the couch,
the dark low hills
of Brigitte Engerer’s hair;
she plays Schumann’s Carnaval.
I might wish something
engaged me like a fisherman’s
hook,
alternative to faith,
anathema to my cloudy wandering.
An inversion of need,
brought up like the wreck of a car
from a lake,
when metal cedes to
sloughing oxide
dust,
hair becomes liquid,
we become aged;
this is my dream
of what a nice summit
might look like.
Dreams
I don’t care much for dreams.
Last night I dreamt
that my ex-boyfriend
was choking me to death with a cord.
I grasped at it with my hands,
thrust my fingers in the space between
the cord and my neck,
that slippery, pliant cartilage
beneath the skin
so much like an uncooked chicken.
He had locked into rage mode
when I answered him
probably not.
And the article that I have chosen
to believe
says that dreams are
entirely without meaning.
I am so comforted, and also
not surprised, because
the way I feel
is engine oil
pooled in a parking lot.
Superficial, manifest,
holographic byproduct
of forward-
propulsion and
less commonly, of reversals.
I keep no secrets from myself.
Probably not, I said and he threw
a plate and, bizarrely, a shot glass.
Probably not, and his rage
took wing, moved from within
the body to without, like
sweat.
Love Is Beautiful
Love is beautiful.
It makes me want to fold
in on myself, vomiting.
It makes me want to clean
my car, to rinse the cans
before I recycle them.
And I see that you glanced upward
recently, at a chalk-pink
dome of plasterwork,
as if inside a human
heart.
Swimming in sgraffito.
Drowning in scagliola.
I remember you, and
cannot forget, and I
will be here,
palpating stone-fruit
in the office kitchen,
waiting to see
if the future is truly
my twin-
if it has been all along,
invisible at my side,
alluded to in ancient script,
again proclaimed in recent study.
Or if I am alone --
inside the human heart,
love is beautiful.
I wished he would come back, my snake.
“But must I confess how I liked him, How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
and depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless...”
I.
How after I found you, and then lost you, I found
a pair of patent shoes
shiny as lacquer,
elementary as small numbers,
and I danced in the mirror to
do I still figure in your life?
(You answered back with the dull edge
of silence.)
And then I painted my fingernails,
I stroked a soft, gray-white rabbit,
I shared the room with some cabbagey flowers,
a big space, which once had been full, and
my pocket torn out.
Where I wondered did that leg go,
that I wore slung over my shoulder like
some ermine’s cousin?
Where that country mile?
This is the way chance
handles the hungry:
the abundance of choice
underwhelms,
everything
mud on a crepe-sole.
II.
Now I turn inward,
walleyed, lovingly,
seeing nothing.
Caressing my alarm clock
every early morning,
it holds me as I sleep.
My life’s shape resembles
a puddle of laundry.
And I remember
your charming accessory,
how it
lashed me to the wall,
but can only buy more house-
plants. Something hardy.
Perhaps a sea grape.
Something substantial.
Squid in its Own Ink
I used to listen to Jacques Brel Is Alive and Singing in Paris.
Now I sit on the couch with a towel in my lap,
I eat rice and beans, find the day exhausting.
I think about godlessness, and about
how wisteria
is in a constant state of diving-down,
or of descending, like rain.
Wisteria: always awaiting
Hyades, or a girl that needs
a pretty photo taken.
In an odd twist, I am informed that
Jacques Brel is Alive and Singing in Paris
is very hard to find, and my copy
has joined the angels
someplace opaque and unknown to me.
First found in a stagnant closet
before my adulthood, last lost and
I am here now with my dishrag and
little phial of alcohol.
I clean the apartment with vigor and eros.
And life is small,
suitable for daily use.
It withstands heat,
it sometimes proffers pleasures:
The hot blackness of night,
hot bar of soap in the shower,
next morning.
Summer showed up yesterday
squawking even at midnight, among
our resting cloud of lime-tone parrots,
and I played Jacques Brel through the television,
wondering
what that might make the neighbors
wonder
