Old Girl
R.A. Allen Canceled sales call one county over left me with time to pay my respects. Not only does the train not stop here anymore, a marker says they closed the line the year you were born. In the TV-repair shop's window a poster demands "Vote Yes!" Maybe it advocated pulling the plug on the whole shooting match. Like you, this town has passed. Its streets are full of no one to ask. I find the churchyard by sighting a steeple against a gravy of stratocumulus. And there among the statuary and the leaning marble stelae you lie limned in weeds but still petite. Drop a plastic primrose and be on my way. You were my first. I reckon I owed you. |
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‹About the Author: R. A. Allen's poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Night Train, RHINO, Word Riot, The Recusant (UK), Gargoyle, and elsewhere. His fiction has been published in The Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and Best American Mystery Stories 2010, among others. He has one Pushcart Prize nomination for poetry and one Best of the Web 2010 nomination for fiction. He lives in Memphis, where he has worked, at various times, as an aluminum-siding salesman, a die maker, a land surveyor, a hod carrier, a jeweler, a bartender, and a systems analyst. More about R. A. Allen here.