Allison Blevins & Joshua Davis| Chorus for the Kill

Chorus for the Kill: poems by Allison Blevins and Joshua Davis. Number 5 in Volume Five of our Editor’s Series.

Cover by Jen Stein Hauptmann: “Skeletons”

Publication:  March 17, 2022 [100 copies]
25 pages
ISBN 978-1-949333-86-2
$ 9.00

Allison Blevins is the author of Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021) and the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). Her books Handbook for the Newly Disabled (BlazeVox, 2022) and Cataloging Pain (YesYes Books, 2022) are forthcoming. She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Executive Director at the museum of americana. She lives in Missouri with her partner and three children. For more information visit http://www.allisonblevins.com.

A former John and Renee Grisham fellow, Joshua Davis holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi, an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine, and an MA from Pittsburg State University. Recent poems have appeared in The Poetry Distillery, The Museum of Americana, and The Midwest Quarterly. He is a doctoral candidate in American Literature at Ohio University, and he lives near Tampa.

On Silence

Silence fills my empty spaces. Think of the ways
jealousy feeds two people—children standing under a tall table.
How hunger waits in the parts so far from your belly you can’t remember
full or empty. How you eat pain to fill pain and the word pain
doesn’t touch this feeling. Language fails us the way sound and color
and food never fail. How a single violin, the fade of purple to pink
to blue, how potato chips have more to say than adjectives. If I were honest,
I’d explain this silence as cold next-day chicken or pie from the tin,
fingers smeared with dip. Everyone tells me I’m not old enough
to hurt this way. I have something to say plainly, about violence,
something about rocking a child in darkness, something small
here is choking on the silence, our country dusked in ash.

–Thank you to Anti-Heroin Chic for first publishing this poem.