Eight wrote this in 2022.

it’s images like this i’d live and die for
kept securely within my chest,
a less piercing form of homesickness
more beautiful -
you aren’t here and yet i feel - and i want you -
as if you were in the next room

it’s been years and i am just now telling you
things that i, before, kept lodged in my throat
it scares me still but i want you to know
the same way i did that way in july when i first
overcame my fear
so let me find words for the finest kind
of golden hour within my mind -

you call me a hurricane, a sea
but what if, for a moment, i was still,
held, wrists in your hands
above my head?
i am all angles and curves in all the wrong places
hard-edged everywhere i should be soft
eyes too dark to be this light
but what if i was beautiful, something close to gentle,
then, there, to you?
i’ve spent my life as soon as i could
running, but what if, for once,
i didn’t want to flee,
held fast in that early morning light?
then at last, desperation could go unspoken,
but be known and seen and felt…

#2022 #eight #implicationsGoBrr #Juneau #ourPoetry

I woke up and I had to type this out before I lost it.

I look at the fireworks show that has become
of my life and call each spark and sparkle
something different, divorced from me
as if I were watching the show on a field
on the 4th of July
and it isn't my own life that keeps exploding -

~this came to me in a dream
-Allēna 3/19/2026 #dreams #inMyBrain #myBrainDoesThis #ourPoetry #thisCameToMeInADream #weirdDream

Mk and I are going to be doing another joint reading!

This time it will be in my Discord server, the opensorceryy club.

It’s on March 31 at 8PM and I hope I see y’all there 💛 mk will be reading selections from its recently published chapbook, Different With Him, and I will be reading some very queer pieces from my most recent zine, Fear Not The Brave Pain, and beyond.

I’m stoked.

-Allēna

#jointReading #mkzariel #ourPoetry #poetryPerformance #queerPoets #WisconsinPoets

I performed “thirsty ghost” tonight at Linneman’s.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DV-AgctgB8z/?igsh=bHpmejc4OW12dzR2

-Allēna

#LinnemanSRiverwestInn #liveperformance #ourPoetry #performancePoetry

“still life (2019)”

“untitled still life (2019)”

I don't want to give names
to your fistfuls of hollow
coffee cup still half full, overturned
baroque broken words, reaching for something
that forever seems older
than you or I in every language
well run dry, and yet
despite yourself
each moment in atemporal space
teeming with life

when we met, I
wanted to drink myself into the ground,
an inelegant death like hemingway perhaps
after bleeding worlds onto ten thousand pages
inspired by black coffee and gin
I'm sober now and you're still empty glasses,
the smell of pages, wine
and cigarettes after two years of silence
I can still vanish into the liquor darkness of you
without ever tasting a drop
I don't want to die anymore
(most days)
and perhaps I am a fool
for wandering through your still life fortress of
melancholy

but you keep coming back to me,
three hundred year old moment
or perhaps you are a memory
I've never been good at untangling how I feel
and some days I feel like I am made of iron
but today I feel like nothing more than glass -


Allēna 3/1/2026 #2019 #bettertogethermke #foolInTheFortressOfMelancholy #Juneau #ourPoetry #owOofMySoul

I have no idea what to call this, but here you go.

january ejected me into this new life
feet first, cords that I tried to cut wrapped thrice round
my throat
choking me
I work myself to the bone to make the best of
this breech rebirth but there’s still all this wrath
that I cannot shake
you tell me to let it go but it’s seared into my
bones, it’s what keeps me going
I have nothing else left to give
january, you are a cruel mother
and I am exhausted from pushing myself
through your days
once more unto the breach

-Allēna 1/20/2026

#ourpoetry

“supplication”

you have taken the world that I was
and left me empty
craving
longing
is there anything that I can use to fill the chasm
on the side of the bed where you once slept

I stumble home
if I can even still call it that
for in the taking, you
took more than just yourself
you took everything that meant something to me
from this space and left it ruined
just like me

now even the flies are starving

sobs wrack my threadbare chest
everyone that I once knew is turning
away from me and into their own personal
darkness, tired
can you come back and give me anything
even undo me again
please

-Allēna 1/11/2026

#bettertogethermke #cheatingincident #hungryGhost #ourpoetry #Zelda

I performed at Linneman’s last night and it went phenomenally!

I was so scared before and after that my chest felt like it had been hit with a frying pan, though..

-Allēna

#ourpoetry #SliceOfLife

A more radio friendly version of my piece “Peak Milwaukee Queer Culture” played on Riverwest Radio today!

You can listen to the episode here.

-Allēna

#Goodbye2025 #NewYearsEve #ourpoetry #radio

We wrote object poems in workshop today.

faceless blessings in disguise
looking askance at gift horses
with bejeweled eyes
are they empty or full to the brim
do I hoard them
or do I give them away
is it finally my time to come out of hiding
after all the time that was stolen from me
this little thing is winking at me offscreen
I think it's telling me everything is gonna be alright
but that's what they said before
and if I stuck them in a lineup their dead eyes would all glint the same
people told me when I
got up from the piano bench that fame
would be inevitable
I was always going to be someone
I was always going to do something
(as if I wasn't already a gift)
time after time I tried to run
time after time I tried to just be
dissolve into winter nights and simply be
unremarkable with the man I swore I had chosen
but what I know of myself is in the doing
all I know of myself is in what I choose to give
away
I let the rest of myself die
collapsed into dead star self hatred
lost somewhere deep in kaleidoscopic shadow
The object I based the poem on.

-Allēna 12/21/2025

#bettertogethermke #objectPoem #ourpoetry