Sample Poems by Allison Cundiff

---

To Lyla, Given Up For Adoption

When your birth mother
was a baby,
her neck pulsed a furious heartbeat in the right side,
working and working without tire.
And now she sleeps
preparing for you, her eyes
dark and heavily lidded,
tired by late pregnancy in
her own childhood, her arms
crossed across her taut belly,
and you curled inside her,
kicking her from within,
waiting to be born.

Who are you,
little frond we will hand away?
You who we barely know,
whose breakfast face,
whose nighttime fears
will be tended to by other hands.
The dimples on your knuckles,
wet from teething,
what will your cry sound like?
The small smell of your neck,
each of your fingers,
that sound of breath
between each sucking of milk,
your eyes soft in pleasure,
I miss you already.

We will soon hand you over
to the sturdily good.
Survivors, soul predecessors
of our stock, hand you over
to those to whom God
first spoke in the desert.
You'll speak their language first,
knowing the names of the sons
who spread east to Canaan to multiply. And you,
a daughter, the dust of the earth.
How will you speak to us from all that?

If after a year or ten you hear
the Elgar or a soft Bach
from a neighbor's open window,
the salt of the Pacific
tangled in your hair,
two thousand miles from us,
will you lift your face to wonder where you heard it before?
You surely remember, from when you formed, from frond to bone,
inside your too-young mother
who played a French cello beside the window
as spring quite suddenly cast its first bloom
on the hawthorne
your great grandfather planted
fifty years before your birth.

---

Tuesday, November 8th, 2016

I had burned the fingers of my left hand cooking something
my neoconservative brother would have dismissed as vegan shit,
pulling a bubbling cast iron skillet from the oven.
Ramon stood behind me, rolling a clove between
his brown cheek and bottom teeth, talking of his mother:
"this pan, my mother, she used. She used to call it su unica arma
since she wouldn't touch the guns on the farm."
He chewed the bulb of the herb, his fingers crushing
another into the mole sauce.
"She had lifted the skillet against my father only once
when he came home after too much drink.
She had to use both hands (his eyes got big, fingers spreading).
My brother Miguel and I sat, hiding under the sturdy of the kitchen table.
I saw her feet facing his, and he went to bed soon after,
defeated. It was never talked about again."
I looked down. My own pan was Ozark kin, cast off to my little liberal
Pueblo-colored kitchen, after a decade of neglect on the wood burning stove.
It cooks chocolate and chilies 202 miles from the fields
where I grew up. It has never seen violence.

At my dinner table, not a single one of us could eat.
We sat together, two women, two people of color, Ramon
and his thin lover, whose waist I always admired,
holding hands on top of the table, safely.
And we were hopeful. We opened bottles of wine,
the dogs lay panting by our feet,
our children making happy noise from the other room.
I pictured our whole future, I pictured the quiet delight of
visiting family overseas, proud of America
with first a person of color and then a female president.
I liked our candidate. I liked the picture
of her in the dark sunglasses best.
I liked the way age sat on her face.

We were confident as the sun was setting.
Someone got out the good bourbon. Poured it over ice.
My long dead grandfather would have cringed, he drank it neat,
(when I looked over at you across the room, you, my lover, always
the quietest one, who wanted the quiet always,
smiling through our noise, all the daylight sadness was gone from your face)
I was giddy. Giddy like Six Flags when you're young
and finally tall enough for roller coasters.
Losing your virginity to a good boy giddy.
Good new president giddy, the way I felt
when I was pregnant and thought, maybe just maybe
I would switch to a female OBGYN, shocking my mother,
but some sort of adolescent courage steered me.
No. A woman is going to pull this baby girl from between my legs.
And tonight, a mom was going to be president.

Later then, after Michigan, and then Pennsylvania.
We left the dishes in the sink and picked up the small heavy bodies of our children
who had fallen asleep on the floor with their books between them.
"Solo quiero estar acostado y no pensar," Ramon almost whispered,
and we opened the windows to the cold night.

Remember when Sugar Ray Robinson lost in 1951?
His barrel of a chest, the smooth bridge of his nose.
I wasn't born yet, but my grandfather talked about it,
had pictures of his fall caught mid air clipped in his top dresser drawer,
the one we couldn't reach. The one that kept the handgun.
Men turned off the television that night so they didn't see his
great body fall to the slight bounce of the ring.

I thought of that referee, his knees next to the great head of Robinson
as I washed my blistering ring finger, the dishes soaking.
I ran it under cold water, watching the pink skin buckle a bit,
I put it in my mouth.
as though to suck out all of the pain.

---

Car Crash

There's a man in a yellow vest sweeping shards of chrome,
fragments of glass, and one large bumper
from the center of highway 141 during morning
rush-hour traffic.
His industrial-grade broom moves between twisted cars
like he's dancing it between couples.
There's no sign of distress on his face.
His lips purse in quiet whistle in his work.
He sees death every day. It's just his job.

The cars in the one open lane
inch around him, changing from frustration
to concern as we see our faces reflected in the
crumpled steel, the blood left over
on the concrete, staining the mirrored twists
of the bumper broken off the sedan that sits motionless, cold,
windows busted out, one car door still open, ignored,
the last of the smoke still creeping from under the hood.

This man, you've passed him one hundred times.
He has stood one lane over at the gas station,
perhaps in front of you
in the line for a hotdog at Busch Stadium.
He has been near you, in the line at the grocer,
he even held the door for you once.

---

Neck

There's something inside my neck.
Right side, below my ear,
when you put your finger to it
there is a pulse.
And a bump. Bigger than the left side.
Firm.
Last month I took my lover's hand and asked him (you know that moment when you're done with the kissing and the washing up)
"do you feel that?" taking his hand, his skin still warm
from before, to the spot.
His brow paused suddenly,
he looked up at the ceiling like he was considering if there would be rain,
and said "it's nothing."
He then went back to tying his shoes, checking his watch,
kissed me goodbye and hurried out.

Next steps.
Tonight I showed
my mother, whose face
was more stern, with
all the weight of funerals on it.
Pressing around, caring enough to push and turn my face,
she even drew her weathered face closer,
and pulling away,
she smiled, relieved,
"it's nothing,"
then kissed, too wet,
my forehead, settling in next to me.