Alison Townsend

April 25, 2023

“Spin” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

SPIN

I don’t remember if the bottle was a Coke or a Fresca,
just that the glass was cool against our hands
in the warm, empty tool shed. Where we’d gathered
after swimming all afternoon at Debbie Worthman’s
eighth grade pool party, everyone’s skin damp
and blue in the shadows, the boys’ chests bare,
the other girls wearing cute, peek-a-boo cover-ups
that matched their demure suits. And me with a frayed

blue shirt of my father’s, its tails tied fetchingly
around my first bikini, a homemade job I’d stitched
up in pink and red paisley from a Simplicity pattern,
the bottom half barely on because I’d run out of elastic.
I don’t know what Debbie’s parents thought when we slipped
away, leaving the pool. Or whose idea it was as we trudged
up the hill between her father’s prize-winning roses,

their scent filling the air like primitive attar,
their metal name tags chinking in the breeze. That seemed
to have come up from nowhere, pushing at us with invisible
hands as we locked ourselves inside the half dark
that smelled of wood chips and compost, our eyes dilating
like cats’, faces suddenly pale beneath Coppertone tans.
I wasn’t sure why I’d been invited to this party
or why I’d come, except that he was here, the boy
who’d pushed me into the pool more times than any other girl,

and who, when the guys “rated” the girls during a lull
in Mr. Tallerico’s “Classical Music Experience,”
had given me a “9,” Beethoven’s booming, making me feel
almost good enough, almost deserving of his attention.
Which, when it fell on me, when our eyes caught
and locked, threw out a tensile, silk line that hooked
my breath and heart as easily as he made jump-shots at games,
the ball teetering on the orange rim—then bingo, in.

While the sweaty mascot pranced in the moth-eaten tiger
suit, and cheerleaders scissored their perfect legs,
and I’d held my breath, hoping he’d look my way, his hand
dribbling the ball as if he was touching my body.
All that, pressurized and pushed down inside as someone
twirled the bottle and it spun, blurring as we held
our breath like fourteen-year-old yogis and (thank God)
it pointed at someone else. From whom I had to look away

as their lips met, my stepmother’s injunctions—Don’t
stare; cross your legs at the ankles—loud in my head.
Though I would have liked pointers, one dry, chaste peck
the year before from Bruce Colley all I had to go on.
But I gazed down until the bottle whirled toward me,
its opening like the little “oh” of surprise that undid
a slipknot inside my body, something not quite desire,
but what I’d soon call anticipation, singing along

with Carley Simon’s song, a fist in my solar plexus
opening and closing like a Luna moth’s wings.
As he moved across the circle and tilted my face up,
his palm cupped beneath the curve of my cheek,
then fastened his silky, Doublemint-scented mouth
over mine, everything in the room disappearing
in the plush wriggle of his tongue, the slight
thrust of his cock stirring beneath cut-off jeans.

And my tongue moving back. As if I had been born
knowing this, as if we were back in the pool,
his hand water on my skin, the rest of the kids gone,
the inside of my eyelids spangled with paisley swirls.
As I leaned further and further into this kiss that would
sustain me all summer, practicing for the next one
with my pillow or the fleshy part of my palm, enlisting
for life to the lure of the male’s hard, angular body,

the taste of mint everywhere like clean, green rain.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Alison Townsend: “I write poetry to make discoveries, to articulate what feels (at least initially) beyond words, to find out what I don’t know I know.”

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January 7, 2022

“Burritos in Wisconsin” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

BURRITOS IN WISCONSIN

After my brother divorced, he came every summer
to my house in Wisconsin with his kids, making
the long journey from San Francisco to Madison
as if he were coming home, the week with us respite 
in his fractured world. I’d meet them at the foot 

of the escalator for Arrivals—tall blond man 
and his two little kids, Gabe with his tight curls 
and green eyes, Fiona in ringlets and a pink polka 
dot dress, a stuffed toy called “Picture Pig” clutched 
beneath her arm, the family photo encased in plastic 

on its plush flank a perfect quartet of loss. 
The kids ran into my arms before I hugged 
my brother, his blue Oxford-cloth shirt perfectly 
pressed, as if he’d bought it just for the trip. I’d looked 
for signs his kidney disease was worse—his face 

drawn, hairline receding, the skin on his hands 
and arms onion paper thin after decades on steroids. 
When we hugged, a little shy at first, I felt Peter 
relax, his gruff guard coming down. All week 
we did summer things—swimming for hours, 

catching fireflies at dusk, visiting caves and steam
trains and farms where the kids fed baby goats bottle 
after bottle of milk as if there were no end to plenty. 
All week, my brother, who’d caught Epstein-Barr 
from a patient and couldn’t recover, slept until noon. 

And all week, I cooked, especially my burritos, 
with their creamy spinach filling, yellow rice, 
and a crisp salad his favorite. “This is so good,” 
he’d say. “This is the best food I’ve ever had.” 
I thought of his words after he died, as I searched 

his house, looking for papers I needed to manage 
his affairs. A stray page from his disability claim 
application documented fears he’d be unable to care 
for his children—true at the end, though they 
were older by then—he barely able to rise 

from the living room bed, the house stinking 
of garbage and piss, loneliness thick as dust, 
despair I can’t forget, no matter how hard I try 
to shake it off. I want to remember us the way 
we were those summers, late sunlight warming

our faces, the picnic table covered with the red 
and white checked cloth, vases of cone flowers 
and Queen Anne’s lace picked by the kids, first 
stars just coming out, the yard filled with fireflies. 
And my brother, eating one burrito after another, 

filled for a moment with everything he needed.

—from Rattle #73, Fall 2021

__________

Alison Townsend: “‘Burritos in Wisconsin, is part of a series of poems I’m writing about my late brother, who died of kidney failure at age sixty-four in 2019. A doctor himself, he was a model of grace and courage, and had one of the longest lasting kidney transplants in the world. The poem arose from various memories (especially about cooking) of the times he visited me in Wisconsin. Siblings can, I think, become homes for one another in adulthood. The poem articulates my hope that I was that for him, while bearing witness to the difficulty and loneliness of his passing. Grief crystallizes things. This is one of the few poems I’ve ever written that came nearly whole, as if dictated.”

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April 7, 2021

“Pantoum from the Window of the Room Where I Write” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

PANTOUM FROM THE WINDOW OF THE ROOM WHERE I WRITE

At sunset the russet oak turns into a lamp.
Each polished leaf glows amber, lit by sun.
As a child, I raked leaves with my mother each fall.
We burned small pyres, their flames the color of loss.

Each polished leaf glows amber, lit by sun.
I could not know my mother would die young.
We burned small pyres, their flames the color of loss.
I stand here watching, older now than she ever was.

I could not know my mother would die young.
The tree is a galleon, its sails coppered by light.
I stand here watching, older now than she ever was.
I raked leaves into rooms and houses as a girl.

The tree is a galleon, its sails coppered by light.
I’ll always be a daughter, part of her body’s bright map.
I raked leaves into rooms and houses as a girl.
Death is a lit tree, its amber walls falling in pieces.

I’ll always be a daughter, part of her body’s bright map.
As a child, I raked leaves with my mother each fall.
Death is a lit tree, its amber walls falling in pieces.
At sunset the russet oak turns into a lamp.

—from Rattle #70, Winter 2020
Rattle Poetry Prize Winner

__________

Alison Townsend: “I wrote this poem in a fabulous online class called ‘The Language of Color’ with California poet and essayist Elizabeth Brennan. During the course, we worked our way through the entire color spectrum. The poem emerged when we were contemplating orange. I live in the country, on four acres of prairie and oak savanna. The huge tree outside my study window, a constant companion, was my starting point. When my mother (who died when I was a child) entered the poem and each line presented itself as an end-stopped sentence, I saw a possibility for using form. I turned to the pantoum, which I love for its slow mystery, back-and-forth movement, and non-linear narrative. It’s a ruminative form and a melancholy one—exactly what I needed to evoke the on-going presence of the past in the present, and the way even great loss can be illuminated by beauty. The tree, the autumn season, my mother’s spirit, the color orange, and the form all combined magically to make the poem possible. Poetry is a calling for me; moments like these are the reason I write.”

 

2020 Rattle Poetry Prize winner Alison Townsend was the guest on Rattlecast #79! Click here to watch …

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January 11, 2020

“Persephone Remembers: The Bed” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

PERSEPHONE REMEMBERS: THE BED

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,
the scab sleep weaves over the raw place torn open.

The bed, the bed, something that happened in the bed.

Her mother is dead
and everything green has been folded away,
like the flower-sprigged eiderdown in the closet
where she buried her face to remember summer
and the scent of her mother’s live body.

The bed, something happened in the bed,

and the bear she once pretended to be—
those times she touched herself where no one had before—
has gotten inside her father’s body, touching
where she touched, and it is wrong then
gone between her fingers and

the bed, the bed. Something that happened,

something that wakes her after she has fallen
a long way through darkness, someone
who shakes her, says to get up and return
to her own bed, it is morning now, “our secret,”
she must not tell her brother and sister.

The bed, something in the bed,
where her mother taught her to make
hospital corners, where she tucks
and folds the blank spaces into rhymes,
counting the beats between each breath,
bed and head, bed and red, bed and dead.

The bed, the bed, something happened and her mother

is dead and there is no one between
the girl and the sparks of their father’s
sadness, loss a bright red wound he circles
like a bear before sleep, the cave walls
flickering with the prints of hands.

The bed, the bed, it is

her own bed then, carved posts
and pineapple finials, the mattress
imprinted with the shape of her body,
and she is a feather, light in her father’s arms.
Though what she remembers is a dream

the bed, the bed, girl moving like a ghost,
walking, just a glimpse of something
that happened to the girl dreaming
in green cotton pajamas she is that girl
in the bed with her father then

back in her own bed again, where the pictures
run together into something wet on her leg,
the bed and the bear and what happened?
It blurs, it is red, and she is her mother,
which must mean she is dead, too.

Though sun shines through white lace
across her window, though her brother
and sister sigh and stir, though she tastes
the dirt from which each green word springs,
bitter as medicine at the back of her mouth.

—from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

__________

Alison Townsend: “I write poetry to make discoveries, to articulate what feels (at least initially) beyond words, to find out what I don’t know I know.”

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April 16, 2018

“The Beautiful Particulars” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

THE BEAUTIFUL PARTICULARS

after Xu Bing’s exhibition, Background Story: A New Approach to Landscape Painting

Because I have forgotten to bring
my small, travelling notebook
to this exhibit, where I have come
to fashion a poem, I’m making notes
on the first piece of paper I find in my purse,
scribbling gibberish about the ocean
and mountains that unfold without end,
willing images to catch and hold, heavy
as black ink in the Chinese brush
of the mind, and thinking grumpily
how the background story of anything
is almost never what it seems.
But when I turn the page over for more space
I see it’s the last veterinarian invoice
for my ancient cat, printed the day
before she died, the record of her failing
kidneys somehow colliding with my mother,
who dies again each autumn,
though she’s been gone fifty years—
everything from my one, small life
illuminated by a Chinese “painting”
that isn’t really one at all but a box
of light that fools the eye with shadows
of found things become something
other than themselves when lit by LEDs,
our ephemeral world limned
real in black and sepia and pearl.
I don’t want to write about sadness
or try to fit the word “synchronicity”
into a poem. I want to be the one figure
in the painting’s huge landscape, staring
into the distance from a grass hut
at something only the artist sees.
But it’s all done with shadows
and this is what I have—loss invasive
and beautiful as the branch of bittersweet
at the bottom of the light box and the silhouette
it casts—this paper I write on shining
like a receipt from the dead.
The truth is nothing lasts.
Not this installation,
which will be taken down
and scattered to the wind,
its beautiful particulars—ferns,
corn husks, hemp fabric, paper,
plastic bubble wrap—never quite
the same, no matter how carefully
they are reconstructed.
Not my cat, beloved familiar,
lying in her grass-lined grave on the back
of our Wisconsin hill. Not my mother,
dust for most of my life, or the girl
I once was, standing at her grave, a clod
of cold earth clenched in my hand,
Not even the shadow that memory casts
on the radiant scrim of my life.
Nothing lasts.
And I wouldn’t have believed it possible
to paint with light if I hadn’t
seen my cat’s grave glazed
with gold one afternoon, last leaves
sifting down, piebald over its surface,
or if I didn’t remember my mother’s face
outlined once by sun when she tilted
her head back and laughed, savoring
the heat of living. I wouldn’t have believed
the dark can tell us so much because of how
it shapes the bright, or that I’d be standing here,
seeing this painting as the act of magic it is,
dazzled by how many places
light unexpectedly lands.
 
 
 
Note:
 
The phrase ‘how many places / light unexpectedly lands’ is from Eloise Klein Healy’s poem, ‘Finally,’ which appears in A Packet Beating Like a Heart.
 

—from Rattle #58, Winter 2017
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Alison Townsend: “I write poetry to make discoveries, to articulate what feels (at least initially) beyond words, to find out what I don’t know I know. ‘The Beautiful Particulars’ began as a kind of assignment, when I was invited to write an ekphrastic poem in response to Xu Bing’s exhibition, Background Story: A New Approach to Landscape Painting, for a local museum reading series. At first, contemplating the magnificent lightbox landscape, I drew a blank. But then I started jotting notes on what I observed, resorting to the back of the last veterinary invoice for a beloved cat I had recently lost. One loss calls out to another, and as I wrote the poem, my mother’s death (which occurred when I was nine) wove its way into the poem, as did the autumn season. Poetry, for me, always emerges from the physical world, so the details of the exhibit and the personal imagery in the poem guided me to the larger understanding that (I hope) it reaches at the end. During the writing process, I was most pleased (and surprised) by the way the poem gathers a lot of different details and experiences, and then holds them all in relation. It’s a meditation on impermanence, as well as a celebration of how that impermanence is also illuminated in so many surprising and beautiful ways. I couldn’t have written the poem (one of the most meaningful for me in the last few years) without the assignment or the exhibit, for which I remain deeply grateful.”

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January 5, 2010

“The Only Surviving Recording of Virginia Woolf’s Voice” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

THE ONLY SURVIVING RECORDING
OF VIRGINIA WOOLF’S VOICE

I’m not expecting to hear her speak, stopped as I am
at a red light in Stoughton, Wisconsin, on the daily, desperate
dash home from work, my fractured spine throbbing
as if it housed my heart not my nerves, this snippet
on NPR as unexpected as recent November warm weather.
But here she is, sounding husky and a bit tired, her plummy
accent drawn out as she speaks about words, English
words … full of echoes and memories, associations
she does not name. It’s still 1937 in her mouth
and later I’ll learn that she’s not really talking at all,
but reading a talk called “Craftsmanship” on the BBC’s
program Words Fail Me, the script held up before her,
like a tablet of light in her long, white hands. Or a window
the sound of her voice opens in my head, her deliberate
phrasing a kind of eulogy to words and the way
They’ve been out and about on people’s lips, in houses,
on the streets for so many centuries, time passing in the hiss
and skritch of the tape. As I imagine her in the studio,
a bit tense perhaps, her hair in that dark knot, dressed up,
though no one will see her, though years later her nephew
will describe the recording as too fast, too flat, barely
recognizable, her beautiful voice (though not so beautiful
as Vanessa’s, he’ll add) deprived of all resonance and depth.
But I don’t know this as I listen, nothing to compare her to
but the sound her words made in my American head, as I lay
on my narrow dorm bed in my first November in college,
underlining phrase after phrase from To the Lighthouse
in turquoise or fuchsia ink, not because I understood
what they meant but because they sounded beautiful
aloud and my teacher had her photograph up in her office.
After my mother died, the first thing I forgot was the sound
of her voice, nothing to preserve it but a moment or two
on tape where she speaks in the background, saying
“Not now, not now,” as if no time would ever be right, even
that scrap vanished somewhere in the past. Though I recall it
as I listen to Virginia Woolf, her voice—which is nothing
like my mother’s, which my Woolf-scholar friend tells me
she “needs some time to get used to”—drifting on for eight
entire minutes, a kind of dream one could fall into, as words
stored with other meaning, other memories spill like smoke
from her throat and the light changes, and I drive on
through the gathering darkness, thinking about voices
and where they go when we die, how to describe pain
then leave it behind, her lamp in the spine
glowing, briefly lighting my way.

—from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

__________

Alison Townsend: “This poem arrived for me in almost exactly the way it is described in the piece. I was on my way home from work, in pain from the effects of a long commute on a healing broken back. I was stopped at a light in my small, Midwest town, when I happened to hear a clip on NPR about the only recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice that has survived. Woolf’s writing has always been important to me, and I was stunned by the sound of her living voice. That set off a stream of associations and I made the leap from Woolf ’s voice to that of my own mother, who died when I was a young girl and whose voice I have forgotten. When I got home, I listened to the clip again, sat down, and wrote the poem. Knowing more than I did (as our poems always do), the poem made the connections and circled back to Woolf ’s concept of the ‘lamp in the spine’ of female intelligence. I felt lucky to have had that moment, where something that felt so difficult in the moment was transformed. All the italicized words are from the recording, except for the phrase, ‘the lamp in the spine,’ which appears, famously, in her writing.”

 

2020 Rattle Poetry Prize winner Alison Townsend is the guest on tonight’s Rattlecast! Click here to watch live …

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August 27, 2009

“Blue Willow: Persephone Falling” by Alison TownsendPosted by

Alison Townsend

BLUE WILLOW: PERSEPHONE FALLING

                                 “Depression is hidden knowledge.”
                                 —James Hillman

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
opening its toothless mouth, darkness seeping out
to fill the dead cornfields rattling around you.
That sound’s back in your head again—
like angry bees or static or rubber bands
breaking. And beneath it a distant hum
you remember being scared was voices
till the doctor explained it was your own brain,
working overtime to understand its disordered signals.

And meanwhile, every sadness on NPR is yours—
from the African country where 30% of the childbearing
women have AIDS, to the Appalachian mother
who sells her great-grandmother’s Blue Willow china
for fifty bucks to feed her kids, to your own
mother, who dies again every autumn, something
wrong when she didn’t come home for Thanksgiving
the way she promised, the torn-sheet dinner napkins
you’d embroidered—“M” for “Mommy”—with ordinary
thread, wrapped in tin foil under the bed, melancholy’s
blue index finger pressed into your forehead, choosing
you for its team. Where it seems you must play for life,

whether you want to or not. Though that’s not
what you’re thinking as you hurtle
through the night, jittery as the rabbit
you swerve to avoid, your head filled
with chattering fog, a glass door sliding shut
between you and the world, that feeling of being
outside yourself so loud you don’t seem real.
Though you are. As you maneuver the car carefully
through the dark, remembering how you willed
yourself to live this way for two years,
synapses flashing like emergency lights
you thought you’d never see again.

But here they are, the medication you’ve ratcheted
down for a year necessary after all, the biochemical
net too small, the darkness you’ve pushed away
for twenty years with what your doctor calls
one hand tied behind you suddenly back.
As you remember setting out your mother’s
Blue Willow on the table every night
as a child—blue people in blue houses
under blue trees—each plate a story you can
walk into, where everything is fine. If it weren’t
so dark inside and you weren’t so scared.
If you could only think how to get there, and what
treasure you are supposed to find when you do.

—from Rattle #30, Winter 2008

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