Kelli Allen, "Otherwise, Soft White Ash"

 

Kelli Allen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the US and internationally. Allen is the co-Founding Editor of Book of Matches literary journal. She is an award-wining poet, editor, and dancer. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022 and she is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize. Her chapbook, How We Disappear, won the 2016 Damfino Press award. Her collections include Otherwise, Soft White Ash (2012), Imagine Not Drowning (C&R Press 2017), Banjo’s Inside Coyote (C&R Press 2019), and  Leaving the Skin on the Bear (C&R Press, 2022). Her book, Otherwise, Soft White Ash, was rereleased Fall 2026 by C&R Press. She currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. Her website is here. 

About Otherwise, Soft White Ash, by Kelli Allen
In this rerelease of Kelli Allen’s first collection of poetry and short fiction, with a new foreword by Brian Turner, readers are asked to consider how grief and longing continuously occupy the same hut. Allen’s work explores how loss, myth, sexual desire, and the wild journey inward come to shape capital S-Story.

You can read more about Otherwise, Soft White Ash on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Otherwise, Soft White Ash

Clearing Materials of Exile 

Hunter and hermit both dissolve bitter with sugar cubes stolen 

from cut glass jars, though neither always remembers the theft.

Each extends then wraps dirt dried fingers around the weak sweet crystals,

mouths diminished in the metal mirror hanging loose in the old barn.

Humiliation is an Easter horse moving directly behind us like some brutal,

selfish child whispering I want my supper while chewing weeds and apples.

We cross one border to move closer to another, as the dark crow 

in our coat pocket closes his eyes, and we are allowed to sleep.

The priest ignores the ark in his woods because he is busy absorbing his shadow,

and the animals know their work is to hide every egg like dark stones meant for the river.

Noon, Like Whiplash 

          

Every episode of self-imposed solitude, 

the moments when she would lock herself 

into a room sometimes for hours, often 

for days, would always be followed 

by extravagant gestures meant to breed 

forgetfulness.  My closets were alive 

with texture and ocular romance.  

I was treated to shopping trips, 

which included purchasing original 

designs from the best shops 

in whatever city we happened to be living 

at the time.  There were expensive chocolates, 

gorgeous piles of books, cosmetics, shoes, 

any articles of expression or indulgence 

she could hope might make it easier 

for me to blanket the segments 

of disaster her erratic attentions 

invariably caused.  I allowed this 

behavior for so many years 

that I no longer feel a prickle 

of shame when I find myself pressed 

against remembering.  

What else could we do, 

this single child and her raging 

mother offering gift after gift 

from a silver horn?  The whole 

is never far, and one fraud 

is as easily dressed in silk as another.

The extravagance ended entirely 

for one year when I was seventeen 

and found myself wearing so much 

of my mother’s blood that the new pale 

yellow sweater I adored became lost 

in awkward blossoms of sticky red. 

I remember cashmere softness before 

I begin to usher in flashes of the surreal 

scene of her fourth suicide attempt.  Memory 

is unfaithful to intention, catapulting 

what we should recognize far 

from what our cognizance vividly defends.  

There is no room for apology 

at any moment in the scene, neither 

when it unfurled as quick thin tentacles 

or now, when recollection feels viscous 

and tastes of paint left to dry on a lid.  

While tracking the minutes 

from the call to the sound 

of the gangly ambulance halting 

near my mother’s window, I focused 

on the saturation spreading peripherally 

down my own arms, soaking 

the delicate fibers of my daffodil sweater.  

There was a pattern forming over 

my forearms and onto the top layer 

of lemongrass-shaded sheets 

my mother bought to match a vase 

with similar colored latticework 

snaking around and through its glass.

In those twenty-six minutes when I pushed 

my hands into her wet arms and waited 

for whatever help would arrive 

through sirens and stillness, I felt 

as though there were streaks of rain 

pelting far too slowly against my face 

and back.  There was more wetness 

in that waiting than what could be 

described as measurable pain. The shape 

of her was an indication that something more 

had gone wrong, but I was lost in the absence 

of humming, and the reticence was a film 

like thin stained glass—fragile 

and something to be irrationally trusted. 

The reality of blood strips all defenses 

into patience, calculations descending 

into calm like knowing the old gods 

are present and full.  Silence 

can be its own kind of vertigo, 

and there is nothing so quiet 

as keeping your mother alive 

and not being certain that you should. 

When her veins were finally bound 

and there seemed to be a cessation 

of rushing, both of fluid and breath, 

I finally looked at her face.  The paramedics 

had obscured her mouth and nose 

with a dome of plastic and whatever color

was left clinging to her skin

seemed temporal and cheap.  

The sheets on her bed were beautiful, 

and watching her blood deploy itself 

over the quiet sheen of the cotton 

was a betrayal of sorts.  I imagined 

she would wake at any moment; her mouth 

opening in an impossible "O," and hordes 

of butterflies would emerge and become her hair.