Greg Allendorf
Poetry
Greg Allendorf is originally from Cincinnati, OH. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from such journals as Smartish Pace, Subtropics, The Portland Review, Narrative Northeast, The Journal, The Hawaii Review, and Memorious: A Journal of New Verse and Fiction. His chapbook, Fair Day in an Ancient Town, was recently selected by Kiki Petrosino for the Mineral Point Chapbook Series from Brain Mill Press. He holds graduate degrees from The University of Cincinnati and Purdue University. Currently, he lives in Columbia, MO, where he is a PhD candidate and Creative Writing Fellow at The University of Missouri-Columbia.
Hominids
and preternatural quiet
raining from the spires. They terminate
in purple mists and tangled banks of thorns.
Heaven’s not a wooden pergola.
Saying at the end of the day will not end it.
You want a turgid orange sunset and a gun,
so earn it.
They’re posting grades on the walls
of my skull this afternoon. I build
backwards. I walk circles and coil,
in leonine terror be-fettered. It’s better
to sleep on the roof in this weather;
tis a rain’s room in my heart. I press the harp
between my burning thighs. My fingernails
clink the crystal flute, a spoiled scale.
“ This poem is from a manuscript I’m working on entitled The Union Terminal. ‘Hominids’ is spoken from a place of compound frustration by a speaker struggling to navigate the fissures between self and self-awareness, citizen and state, soul and body. It criticizes a cultural tendency toward binary thinking and yearns for justice and unity: civil, human, and spiritual. ”