Allison Blevins & Joshua Davis


HOW WE STAND IN EVERY TYPE OF LIGHT

Do not try to picture clarity or color, not how your mother’s favorite dress swirled in the wash, not gasoline floating on water, how a rock or stick might chase the image like a brush on canvas, not your lover’s face through leaded glass steamed and scrubbed. If you close your eyes. If you tilt your head back, expose your neck. If you turn your body parallel to the wind. No. Do not imagine or tilt. Do not shake the slides. Do not spell backward the name of your childhood street. Walk to the window, like a child in love with winter. Whatever you do, don’t blink first. 
 

Allison Blevins received her MFA at Queens University of Charlotte. Her book Slowly/Suddenly is forthcoming in 2021 (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press). Her book Cataloguing Pain is forthcoming in 2022 (YesYes Books). She is the author of the chapbooks Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), part of the Robin Becker series. She is the Director of Small Harbor Publishing and the Executive Editor at the museum of americana. Her work has appeared in such journals as Mid-American Review, the minnesota review, and Raleigh Review. She lives in Missouri with her spouse and three children where she co-organizes the Downtown Poetry reading series. 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 M.A. 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.