Alison Townsend Poems

Sleepwalking.
That's what you think
when you see the girl walking
alone at West Towne Mall; she's
...

Because the body is a map
and because the map I know best
is the one of this country, I pluck her
from the pages of the book of myth
...

It happens in the dark.
If it was light would she be able to stand it?
Her father's bed a cave she crawls into
when she wakes, forgetting, then remembering,
...

He wanted to paint me.
Though I was married to his best friend,
I felt his eyes follow me everywhere,
his gaze like a sable brush on my skin.
...

No matter what you do, she's a girl looking both ways
isn't she? When you really think about it. When you stand
in her shoes, whether they are the open-toed, gold sandals
of Greek myth, platform wedges and Indian water-buffalo
...

The radio makes me nervous. But there was a time when I loved it, thir-
teen and falling asleep to the hum of my black-cased transistor, its
leather handle looped securely around one wrist. Pulse beat against pulse
...

You think it will never happen again.
Then one day in November it does, the narrow,
dusty boards of the trapdoor you fell through
twenty years before cracking apart, a black grin
...