A Web del Sol Featured Writer


ALLYSON SHAW

Lightening makes a virgin widow, a house
a husk that wants striking twice. I want fire by
trial, black heart, coal planet, new world.

Allyson Shaw, a novelist and poet, edits the e-zine Die Cast Garden. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in Mudfish, Volt, Third Coast, and Melic Review, among others. Her short fiction is anthologized in Absolute Disaster.

The poems in this chapbook are from Allyson Shaw's full-length manuscript The Bon Bon and Love Token, which will be published by Del Sol Press in 2004.



Io

She scrapes her hoof gingerly
through the sandy, pebbled shore
and tries to spell, soberly,
her name. It's a sad labor

she deliberately undertakes.
When she is through the "I" mark,
bent like a little sea-snake,
she starts the circle's curl-mark.

She hopes her father remembers,
and she glances up tenderly,
her fringed eyes like dark wet stones.
She scrapes her hoof gingerly.


from The Bon Bon and Love Token

Lizzy Borden
The Ogre's Seven Daughters
The Snake Charmer
Conception
Fever
Heaven
Sheila-Na-Gig
Morphine Psalm
Golgotha

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