The Contradiction


When you ask me, think first of how it hurts
me to love you, how the modern air stings
the flesh I tore not only for you
but for the pendulum
we are here to subscribe to.

You remember what I told
you in the dead
of night with our legs
tangled completely, our fingers
crossed, bone over bone?

And new tragedies of cold
habits and their consequences
breaking through to the inevitable,
which like a stampede wind
ran straight through our tender
neurons, ghosted numb as smoke?

So give me a chance is what I’m saying.
So give me something to look at
while we’re still here, waiting
for no one but ourselves,
before we give in to this
haunting siren of sleep.

Allison Leigh writes poems, songs and stories and was born in 1989 in Bakersfield, California. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a National Emerging Artist Residency from the Grin City Collective in Grinnell, Iowa. She studied English, creative writing and film at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where she earned a BA with honors in 2011. Her photography has been featured in Brusque, MUZZLE and Bear River Review, while her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Evergreen Review, The Collagist, Red Lightbulbs, Birdfeast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mixed Fruit, 20x20, Inscape, Dunes Review and elsewhere. She likes rearranging things, collecting handwritten notes, acting and ruminating on universal abstractions. She lives and works in Traverse City, Michigan.

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