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
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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 |