Cynthia Rausch Allar| Deviant

Deviant: poems by Cynthia Rausch Allar. Number 8 in Volume 5 of our Editor’s Series.

Publication:  January 26, 2023 [100 copies]
24 pages
ISBN 978-1-949333-95-4
$ 12.00

Cynthia Rausch Allar received her MFA in Writing at Spalding University in 2004. Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Myrrh, Mothwing, Smoke from Tupelo Press and The Cancer Poetry Project, as well as in Two Hawks Quarterly, Naugatuck River Review, Evening Street Review, Off the Rocks, Paper Street, Bloom, and other journals.

Loud Hollow Tone

It woke me in the night, the faraway sound
of my old life falling away. Of distance
growing, the rumble of tires on concrete, the jingle
and click of phones unanswered. The hiss of friends
leaving. Silence. It broke into sleep, absence
a noise, like an old friend’s voice predicting doom
for me and my lover, and the murmur under
the augury, echo from her own story—
I knew quite young that I was gay.
To her, my mid-life awakening rings wrong,
condemning me in a loud hollow tone.
The old life crumbling, the friends this time, but soon
the family, shock of subsonic thunder,
of vibration so deep it cracks the bones.

[ Our thanks to Bloom Magazine for first publishing this poem. ]