ghazal for any party/every bad dream

The room is crooked & filled. No wine glass nor shoe pair stand alone—
dance floor boasts bodies, wrecking borders—your lover’s arms raised alone.

Wallflowers chain-smoke with their tailbones flush to plaster—exhaled plumes
loiter as halos—give them an hour, they will walk home alone.

Love seat congregation: bruised knuckle boy. Mole hill of sticky kush.
Pinch, roll. Licks the paper’s seam shut. Hums Al Green’s ‘Tired of Being Alone.’

Flick of flame singe hem, pull and pass. Shot glass smash & glitter—shiver
of sequins—curl of bathroom queue. You cut line to cut lines alone;

bluetooth bass tremors tequila. Postnasal drip, last week’s paycheck.
Start bussing all stagnant surfaces. Your euphoria alone

could shove time/clock. Chemical confidence. Shoulders panther past baby
punks & bared teeth. Dig up strangers to tongue kiss for cab fare—a loan.

Your lover dancing: small boat riding rhythm’s limbs. She ducks and spins,
doesn’t need you. Their movement all water—surrounded & alone.

Farewells are for the sober. Pocket ride money. Sprint five blocks home—
ignore moon. Snort three more constellations. Sneer in mirror alone.

Spill your guts to the empty—silence knows when to shut its mouth. Try
not to cry. Find that Al Green song. Sing it soft with sunrise, alone.

to know a back seat

while your stepfather drives around with both
direction and none—enraged, looking for
his wife/your mother—he is looking for
your first home dancing in a downtown club.
She walks and laughs, brown sugar legs on edge
of her seat—hops down with a Sure I’ll dance
and we are looking for her at the main
entrance and back door—the alley with its
mysteries, its stench of piss and garbage.
Streetlights high five the oil slicks—my first
home is oblivious to our hunt, has
her own in process—crosshair, stiletto.
If we succeed and pick her up, her eyes
are heavy, her teeth the only light in
the Honda. We will pull over five times
so she can vomit—it will be a soft
rock and silent treatment soundtrack, the booze
in reverse is a stench that clings to her,
stays in the car and twist-turns my stomach
beneath the zipper of my pajamas,
of course ones with the feet; I am so small—

tea and oranges

My favorite parts of you were balanced on fists and dead writers, middle fingers
jutting up rusted, outlasting most landmarks as the city busted seams
and spilled its paint through all the neighboring fields.

You remained the unruined, or rather the never revitalized. Tender to the touch.

Our first night we spent on the stoop, marveling moon at the street end rising and
rising. A passing car hurled raw eggs and the shells snapped by our shoes—one-two,
one-two. Your own empty palm backlit in headlights. I sank the image into brain’s
amber. A romantic’s urge to preserve it all.

To the boy kicked off the bus for punching someone square in the face. For your
whiskey wrist shaking key into lock. For key bent into comma. The books kept
for wooing—Dylan Thomas in July, Burroughs when you trusted me.

For the poems in lowercase, for sad roar of laundry and lips thin as wire.
For all the songs that made you cry. For the lost hours, somewhere between the bar
and hell. For your shoe print on my thigh. For every couch you called home.
For your knee in the snow in December. For the empty bottle raised to Turrentine.
For my stereo pawned and our rooftop grief. For the cardigan covering our heads,
pressed together till they hurt. For all that rain still soaking us to the bone.

*

Nikki Allen believes in revolution, strong coffee, hard knocks, and the sweetness. She is the author of numerous books, including Hotwire (River Dog Press, 2021) and Ligaments of Light/Tigering the Shoulders (Night Ballet Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Muzzle Magazine, Gasconade Review, Nailed, Crash, out of nothing, Profane Journal (as a Pushcart Prize nominee), and Encyclopedia Destructica, among others. She is also a Teaching Assistant for Megan Falley’s ‘Poems that Don’t Suck’ and ‘After the Ode’ writing workshops. She lives in Ohio.