Allison Benis White is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades, among other journals. She is currently at work on a second manuscript, Small Porcelain Head, which received the 2008 James D. Phelan Award for a work-in-progress from The San Francisco Foundation. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
Waiting
I think of broken snow, but this is permanent. Two separate women on a bench—crossed at the wrists,
her hands could make a smaller version of the dancer unlacing her shoes. Or maybe she's just clutching her ankle in order to communicate a small, but consistent pain. The kind that makes you look at pictures because words are not sufficient to describe it.
God said just float on a black lake like a child floats on her back to stare at stars. Let go. Watch cool paper boats. But I'm afraid of black water and the way women ignore each other at restaurant counters (one sips her coffee while the other draws circles on a paper napkin). When a child throws a stone into a lake, God is pleased, and opens in rings, then fades to prompt the child to throw again.
When I hear her set her coffee back on the counter, I look at my napkin to pretend I'm occupied with my love of circles. This could be an aerial sketch of twirling ballerinas, I think—each dancer ignoring the small white pain in her ankle. Like a moon incessantly reflected in a lake. When a child floats on a paper boat, she wonders, Where do stones go after they've pleased God?
This is a hinge at the end of a lake boat, but I still don't know how to draw the fear of separation. We were alone for a long time. After many years, God said to the child, There are hundreds of wet stones in your mouth—and inside stone, the possibility of black unopened umbrellas.
La Bouderie
Never my wife, only your mother, and even this only once. Rarely the phrase only child, shameful in most cultures, when he described me, but often my youngest or daughter. He carried me at a party once when I was tired and soon I said we need to leave. A boy whose father leaves is called the man of the house. Yet what happens to a girl is not the woman but we. She and her father, someone could say, live in a gray house on a quiet street. Without her is the oldest meaning of us: my father holds my hand when we walk to the store. When observed from an adult window, anchorless, she and he becomes an almost lovely phrase in its lack of history. Seven years, to summarize, my father and me. Seven years before the phone rang. He answered at his desk. Standing in the hallway I asked who, without turning to me, drained of color, not your mother, but rather the name Wendy.
God said just float on a black lake like a child floats on her back to stare at stars. Let go. Watch cool paper boats. But I'm afraid of black water and the way women ignore each other at restaurant counters (one sips her coffee while the other draws circles on a paper napkin). When a child throws a stone into a lake, God is pleased, and opens in rings, then fades to prompt the child to throw again.
When I hear her set her coffee back on the counter, I look at my napkin to pretend I'm occupied with my love of circles. This could be an aerial sketch of twirling ballerinas, I think—each dancer ignoring the small white pain in her ankle. Like a moon incessantly reflected in a lake. When a child floats on a paper boat, she wonders, Where do stones go after they've pleased God?
This is a hinge at the end of a lake boat, but I still don't know how to draw the fear of separation. We were alone for a long time. After many years, God said to the child, There are hundreds of wet stones in your mouth—and inside stone, the possibility of black unopened umbrellas.
La Bouderie
Never my wife, only your mother, and even this only once. Rarely the phrase only child, shameful in most cultures, when he described me, but often my youngest or daughter. He carried me at a party once when I was tired and soon I said we need to leave. A boy whose father leaves is called the man of the house. Yet what happens to a girl is not the woman but we. She and her father, someone could say, live in a gray house on a quiet street. Without her is the oldest meaning of us: my father holds my hand when we walk to the store. When observed from an adult window, anchorless, she and he becomes an almost lovely phrase in its lack of history. Seven years, to summarize, my father and me. Seven years before the phone rang. He answered at his desk. Standing in the hallway I asked who, without turning to me, drained of color, not your mother, but rather the name Wendy.