Like birches, the daughter guards the house, makes her arms into gears and pulleys. She is of use. Like car-lined residential streets. Like book-lined shelves. Like coat-lined closets. Wallpaper. Pedestrians. Rugs. Grease. Leaves. The daughter wraps them all in her long golden blanket, squared with black and green patchwork like a kiss. The daughter remembers every number, knows how to tie a bandage. One day, the daughter will tell her children about her singing. Like calming echoes—the tweets and trills of everyone who ever left—like picks buried hilt deep in rock, her canary voice skims around every room in the house.
[Like birches, ….]
Allison Blevins
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“[Like birches, ….]” from WHERE WILL WE LIVE IF THE HOUSE BURNS DOWN: by Allison Blevins.
Published by Persea Books on November 5, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Allison Blevins.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of five chapbooks and four collections. Winner of the 2024 Barthelme Prize, the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award, and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing and lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com
Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award
Straddling genres―prose poetry, micro memoir, fairy tale, autofiction―Where Will We Live If the House Burns Down is first and foremost the story of a marriage. Borrowing elements from surrealist writers and artists, it explores the effects of chronic illness, disability, and a spouse’s gender transition. All of these issues swirl through the central marital relationship and the daily lives of its two lead characters, Sergeant and Grim―even as the book’s narrator, unreliable and unobjective, increasingly takes center stage. Reminiscent of writers like Sabrina Orah Mark and Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, this book is as engrossing as it is experimental, traversing complicated domestic and emotional terrain by way of Allison Blevins’ vivid imagination.
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