If You Climb, Fall

There was a wound-dresser in the forest, somewhere deep, maybe sleeping in the sticky tree hollow that still sometimes holds nesting dolls and eggs, tiny gifts, talismans, things we know matter, twin feet in this world and the other. So, when you came, under sun, scabs freshly bloomed, populating your back’s nude surface, to announce what the branches had left when you slid their surfaces from canopy to ground, I handed you a ticket for the woods and we left together, closing each door behind, certain that another Carthage burns softer the closer we come to any shore at all.

From Guest Contributor Kelli Allen

Kelli is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has won awards for her poetry, prose, and scholarly work. She served as Managing Editor of Natural Bridge and holds an MFA from the University of Missouri St. Louis. She is the director of the River Styx Hungry Young Poets Series and founded the Graduate Writers Reading Series for UMSL. She is currently a Professor of Humanities and Creative Writing at Lindenwood University. Allen is the author of two chapbooks and one flash fiction collection. Her full-length poetry collection, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, arrived from John Gosslee Books in 2012 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.