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FOOL FOR POETRY
ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES
New Irish Voices
Liberty Walks Naked
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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Lauren K. Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. Her work has been awarded prizes such as the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize at Cornell, an International Publication Prize from The Atlanta Review, and honorable mention in the 2009 Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2003 Gival Press Tri-Language Poetry Contest. She has been published in journals such as Black Arts Quarterly, The Caribbean Writer, The Belleview Literary Review, and Crab Orchard Review among others, as well as in the anthologies Growing Up Girl and Gathering Ground. She is co-editor of From the Heart of Brooklyn, and her chapbook, Dawn In The Kaatskills, was published in April 2008 by Longshore Press.
Photo © Rachel Eliza Griffiths
How it Touches UsFor Anjane Maharaj
Our teacher trembled at the board as she unravelled the snarl of events: exhaustion, a nap, the sickening realization. Our friend was in a coma. We’d gawked
at lunchtime around Anjane’s desk, shuddered at her calm as she loaded up the insulin, flicked the needle and slipped it beneath her skin, its live blue tracks.
I remember thinking I couldn’t bear to live like that but day after day when her chair remained empty, I prayed she would come back to her body. Once,
we’d worked together on a project, about the universe and its parts—planets, stars, atmosphere, black holes. I couldn’t remember which of us had kept it afterward.
The whole class went to the funeral, young and somber in our crisp collars and dark overalls. We shuffled past the coffin; she lay white-faced and red-lipped as a doll.
The pyre waited at the river, its rough frame wreathed like a wedding car with marigolds and loud red hibiscus. Our teacher said we didn’t have to, but we followed her
into the crowd gathered on the bank. The fire flung sparks like little stars. When the pundit lit the torch to the wood her mother’s wails rose, first a tired thread, then heavier,
in thick, tangled knots of grief. When her body moved I was unafraid; I thought we would witness a miracle, that she’d get up and walk through those flames grinning.
But the motion was mechanical – her muscles stirring as the tendons and ligaments contracted – a reaction to the heat. That was all. No act of God. No resurrection.
Instead, the bang: her skull shattering, no longer able to contain her brain as it expanded; the awful realization that all laws of matter must hold true, that she was gone.
©2010 Lauren K. Alleyne
Author Links
Three poems by Alleyne in The 2River Review Three poems by Alleyne in Torch 'A Grab Won't Cure My Feminism': essay by Alleyne in Women's Studies Quarterly
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