Allison Benis White Selected Poetry

From the long poem ‘Please Bury Me in This,’ paired with paintings in Joshua Hagler’s monograph ‘This is the Picture.’

Allison Benis White

From the long poem Please Bury Me in This

As if death was a place and the dream was rectangular.

On the wall near the window, my father wrote and underlined, The crows are Nazis in disguise.

After he died, I hung his blue paintings in my room to remember his

mind.

Now I can see through the wall to the sky.

Allison Benis White

From the long poem Please Bury Me in This

I am writing to you as an act of immolation, relief.

If each letter is a will, I want Djuna Barnes’ words written in the 

dust:

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

Once I stood in a black dress at a bus stop and opened a clear

umbrella.

Waiting for hours in a glass room.

Dear world, I want now what I have always wanted: scissors and

someone to write to.

Matches and someone to write to.

I mean the bowl I’m carrying is broken and filled with feathers.

Whatever God is, something gentle inside something ruined in the

mind.

Allison Benis White

From the long poem Please Bury Me in This

I am writing to you as an act of ending.

Cutting faces out of paper and folding them in envelopes like

thoughts.

Am I a monster, Clarice Lispector asked in The Hour of the Star, or is

this what it means to be human?

To be alive, I think as I cut another face.

What makes the shape become visible, and breathe, is the angle and

variation of absence.

Allison Benis White

From the long poem Please Bury Me in This

I mean the death of death leaves a hole.

Tell me everything now before you go: word by word the mouth

assembles the soul.

Allison Benis White

From the long poem Please Bury Me in This

A poem like any religion, mortality and bewilderment confined and

lit.

The singing I heard as a child as I sat in the stall of the temple bathroom

with my legs shaking.