Contributor: Allison Grayhurst

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Inside your luscious eyes
is the burden of depth,
are the stones and rivers
of centuries unguarded
by time.

On your lips
is the sensual curve of tree-line
and sea-shell, is a language
unbroken by bad experience.

On your nose
of boyish turn are nostrils
unlocking the breath of endurance,
is the edge where sunlight rests
after travel.

On your forehead
is a heavy mist of
oscillating pain and grace,
are the marks of a struggle
relieved by love.

On your jaw, cheek and chin
is the strength of the moon
and night-wooed things,
is the hoot and howl
of the sleepless earth, ascending.


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Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has over 650 poems published international journals. She has eleven published books of poetry, seven collections, seven chapbooks; www.allisongrayhurst.com

Contributor: Allison Grayhurst

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The God I follow
is the breastbone of all beginnings,
the gallop in the manned animal,
the grief that murders any half-measures,
and lifts the eyes to meet the sun.
The God I love is love
unexplained, strange as the depths
of the oceans and strong as gravity.
This love swims through chimneys and air vents,
cloaks the guilty and the saved, is reborn
in every merciful eye.
The God I follow is forgiveness,
blind to all but the true measures of the heart,
is the Christ-arrow that weeps with the hungry
and bends to the burn of divine surrender.
The God I love is personal as the body,
is a lifetime pasture of rich anguish
and gentle revelations.


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Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has over 650 poems published international journals. She has eleven published books of poetry, seven collections, and seven chapbooks; www.allisongrayhurst.com

Contributor: Allison Grayhurst

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otherwise the moon would be
half a shadow and the wasp,
a sandbox companion . . .
otherwise a gentle wind would
scorch the birds and seventy years
of staying alive would be ineffectual . . .
otherwise the rain would die and
I would bear my bed like the torturer's glove . . .
otherwise, the trees would crouch
to the dead earth and the eyelid of God
would remain forever closed . . .
otherwise the child would plan his days
by astrology's chart and the broken hearted
would long no more . . .
otherwise home would be a filthy cave
and my bath could never drain,
but would remain a stagnant
murky cold . . .


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Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has over 650 poems published international journals. She has eleven published books of poetry, seven collections, and seven chapbooks; www.allisongrayhurst.com

Contributor: Allison Grayhurst

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In the whisper of tomorrow
the wood is burning and the trees
have died. A swallow is perched
on the fence as the twilight nears.
I have taken the hinges
off the door, waiting to see what enters,
waiting as my hunger works like
midnight in my stomach, dictating
the flavour of the coming stars.
Daunted, branded by the heaving wind,
alone with my prayers and the telephone turned
up high -- will the answer come before the grave
or will obscurity greet me every new dawn
like a hand unheld or a gate torn down?
It is humming, the sound of this underground sorrow.
It hums of poetry and the earth and the bug eaten leaves.
It burns and cannot bloom in bookstores, will not
in the silence of a single decade or in the darkness of
a closed drawer.
Outside, the children go inside, readying for sleep.
I pace the floor
and send my kisses in mid-air.


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Allison Grayhurst has had over 200 poems in more than 130 journals, magazines, and anthologies throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, and in the United Kingdom, including Parabola (summer 2012), South Florida Arts Journal, The Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, The New Quarterly, Wascana Review, Poetry Nottingham International, The Cape Rock, Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry, poetrymagazine.com; Fogged Clarity, Out of Our, Quantum Poetry Magazine, Decanto, and White Wall Review.
Her book Somewhere Falling was published by Beach Holme Publishers, a Porcepic Book, in Vancouver in 1995. Since then she has published nine other books of poetry and two collections with Edge Unlimited Publishing. Prior to the publication of Somewhere Falling she had a poetry book published, Common Dream, and four chapbooks published by The Plowman.
Her poetry chapbook The River is Blind was recently published by Ottawa publisher above/ground press December 2012.
She lives in Toronto with her husband, two children, two cats, and a dog. She also sculpts, working with clay.

Contributor: Allison Grayhurst

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Marked in the morning like a country
finally lost and then
replanted. Or autumn in the hardened
inner walls, wearing down,
preparing for the onslaught of cold.

I am neither in the shadows nor building beauty
like pity that outlasts mercy
and all wounds that curse mercy
in the cradle of its infant power.

Blazing earnestly at first until instructions falter,
glowing faint under duress, until all that is left
to be heard is a mild ‘maybe’. And shapes
without fields or dunes prevail in the un-sunned landscape.

Planets make themselves known by the friction they bestow,
by the damage of their effect and endurance.
I draw out my ecstasy sitting under a table
where there are no footprints save but what small animals make,
adorning with their furry glory
the richness that lies below.

Marked at the closing. Blowing
into a cave. I would give it all to feed again
from your stick, minus myself on the chopping board
of thorough understanding, touch
the throne of your tenderness as I did once.

Once, when my anguish had no restraint,
teeter-tottered on a sawdust precipice with gruelling frenzy,
and I was on my knees
in a donut shop bathroom
as it burst through.

I was purged in the blizzard of my making,
electrified by love that was more than love, bursting.

Swaddling that still-seething anguish with a thousand kisses,
breaching allegiance to patience and remorse,
I was cupped in the golden constellation of your hand, arriving
eclipsed, momentarily
completed


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Allison Grayhurst has had her poetry published in over 115 literary magazines Her book, Somewhere Falling, was published by Beach Holme Publishers She lives in Toronto, Canada. She also sculpts, working in clay.