AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "HORROR, TOO, HAS A HEARTBEAT" BY CARIBBEAN AMERICAN POET LAUREN K ALLEYNE



LAUREN K. ALLEYNE is a Caribbean American poet, born in the twin-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. She left her island home at eighteen years old after receiving a scholarship from St. Francis College in New York City, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English.

In 2002, Alleyne graduated with a Masters Degree in English and Creative Writing from Iowa State University. She was awarded a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetry from Cornell University in 2006.

She is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019) two chapbooks, Dawn in the Kaatskills (2008) and (Un)Becoming Gretel (2022) as well as co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and The Caribbean Writers, among others.

Her most recent honors include a nomination for the 2020 NAACP Image for Outstanding Poetry, the longlist for the 2020 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the shortlist for the 2020 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Her poetry was selected for the 2021 Best American Poetry Anthology, the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day (2018, 2020, 2021, 2022), and was a finalist for 2019 Best of the Net.

In 2022, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia recognized Alleyne with an Outstanding Faculty Award for her work at James Madison University, where she serves as a professor of English and executive director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center.

She currently resides in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Visit the poet's official website at https://laurenkalleyne.com
Photo Credit: Erica Cavanagh


HORROR, TOO, HAS A HEARTBEAT BY LAUREN K ALLEYNE



They are students and pastors, doctors and teachers. They walk their dogs in parks, and plant perennials under backyard trees. They are runners, readers, car-lovers, coffee drinkers. They know how to pick a bottle of wine and the best cuts of meat. They say good morning, ask about our days, talk about the weather. They slink past us, invisible and unnamed. They hold the doors for us, give directions to strangers passing through town. With their broad or slender hands they touch us.

They call home the same cosmic nation of which we are all citizens. They, too, are émigrés to the countries of flesh. They are our neighbors. They are our kin. At night, they close their eyes and descend into the old country, confuse its formlessness for shadows. Sometimes, they turn their backs and walk so deep into the mist all the pathways disappear when they open their eyes they are no place they recognize. They wander the landscapes of mismatched realities, carrying their given or earned burdens. Sometimes the carrying kills them. Sometimes it kills us.





HORROR, TOO, HAS A HEARTBEAT continued



Love is like a language their tongues have forgotten how to move in. It lies in them, a trapped and withering worm. Sometimes they pluck it out, crush its squirming under their boots. Sometimes its writhing drives them closer to some unspeakable edge as they watch us live inside our ordinariness, wear it like skin. They press against the borders of us, ticking with despair or bitterness or hate. They want in. They want us to come out. With desperate and hungry hands, they reach for us.


NOTE: Due to a technical glitch, I was unable to justify the margins of the text as it appears in the original printed form.





Source: Honeyfish by Lauren K. Alleyne

First published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd., UK, 2019.

Published in the USA by New Issues Poetry and Prose.