Alison C. Rollins

3 weeks ago | nypl.org | Hadara Bar-Nadav |Steven Duong |Alison C. Rollins |Danez Smith

Bar-Nadav reimagines modern-day wellness from her perspective of a medical editor whose family history of Holocaust survival prompts her dissection of the pharmaceutical industry in a series of erasures and referential narratives. "Betta fish are a motif," Duong informs in his poem, "Novel." The fish stand in for conflicts of all sorts: familial, ecological, migratory, creative.

Mar 26, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Alison C. Rollins

Skip to Content I see you, peeping Tom, beside yourself with rage at what I done did, hands gone idle from deprivation. I see you, Uncle, with your fingers at the trapdoor, to place crumbs of a biscuit at my mouth in the dark. Through a hole the size of a mustard seed, I affix my eye and become faith itself, become the all-seeing god in female form, the grown woman grammar of Black vernacular. Congregating mice enter my sanctuary, sniffing, praying with their teeth.

Mar 1, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Alison C. Rollins

Skip to Content I am a product of my time. Time is a body that resembles a sound without a scale. Forever foreclosed fortitude. In heaven, the dinner bell rings as elegy. The porch-light stars turn on their mothering moths. Betrayal takes at least two, and wherever two or more are gathered, I am there in their pulsating timbre. To hear is to hunger for the gendered race of sound. In my midst, loneliness listens. In confidence, I am secreted away.

Mar 8, 2023 | brickmag.com | Alison C. Rollins

What is a person but an animal? Women, especially mothers, are raptors. I come from people who could fly. From above, one hundred feet in the air, approximately ten storeys high, the red-tailed hawk perceives its prey—a grey-haired mouse. A silver Subaru speeds down the highway, my mother gripping the steering wheel. Writing is no different from camera work.