Jason Allen has an MFA from Pacific University and is currently a PhD candidate at Binghamton University, where he has been at work on his second novel, his debut full-length poetry collection, and his memoir, Moonlight On The Tracks, a section of which was recently nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Prize. Some of his short fiction and poems have been published in: Passages North, Cream City Review, Paterson Literary Review, Contemporary American Voices, Ragazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Oregon Literary Review, and other venues. He’s a sucker for any good story with survival and redemption at its heart. If you would like to contact him, please feel free to request his email address from the Jane’s Boy Press website. He would love to hear from you.

You can also visit Jason's professional website at this link.

Jason's debut chapbook, Gunmetal Blue, will be available from Jane's Boy Press in September 2015

A Meditation On Fire

Because I did not die
in the log cabin where I was born,
I shoulder the Green Mountains
wherever I go, breathing best
when the leaves turn to flame.

Because I did not die
against the bark of oaks or pines
on those blurry-eyed drives on
winding roads, I hold stubborn
to the hazy hand of luck or fate.

Because I did not die
in one of those broken-bottle rooms
I hold the many shards inside
to sleep with kaleidoscopes,
dream in mosaic.

Because I did not die
in the grip of demons
I’m called upon to help others live
by sharing the ugly story of myself,
by laughing at the unlikelihood

of these mornings
when I greet the sun,
when it announces itself,

grateful

even as I burn.


Eulogy

This autumn morning,
acorns  ping off the pavement like hail,
cars and semi-trucks slog along
the highway outside my door;
I lose myself in the zipper sound
of tires cutting sheets of rain,
my memory split wide,

and I backslide to that night-walk
across a highway bridge in colder rain
than these drops falling now, in that
west coast city, leather jacket slick,
my body a magnet for streaks from
the streetlights, bag heavy on my back,
bag filled with novels for my English class;
cold and wet and trudging against
the hangdog expression my old friend wore
just after the hug, just after I brought
a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude
for him to read in rehab, his first time
through those revolving doors

and I’m slipping down the well,
no coins left for wishing, plunged into
one of those winter mornings we spent high
beside the ocean, when the sky bled Easter egg dye,
another morning after we hadn’t slept,

when teenaged and bleary-eyed we watched
the gulls battle over stale crusts of bread,
autumn wind like a cold callused hand, slapping,
slapping, all those billions of gallons crashing,
pulling us under, all that whirling blinding sand,
all those solemn promises to escape that town,
before it was too late, to make something
of our lives.


--both of the above poems feature in Gunmetal Blue