Allison Creighton Featured Reader at Tavern of Fine Arts on Monday, October 26

Allison Creighton will be one of three featured readers at the •chance operations• reading at the Tavern of Fine Arts, 313 Belt Avenue, on Monday, October 26.

Other featured readers will be Howard Schwartz and Jeff Friedman.

Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Admission is FREE.

Open-mic follows the featured readers.

Allison Creighton holds an MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She teaches part-time at Washington University in St. Louis and serves as a contributing editor for River Styx. Her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Natural Bridge, The Mochila Review, and two anthologies, and she received first prize in the 2010 Wednesday Club of St. Louis Original Poetry Contest. Her first book of poetry, Drawing Down the Moon, was published by Turning Point in 2015

On a Night Too Hot for a Sheet

Now that you have entered
the space that surrounds me,
we shall be as one.
I will pull you inside with such a touch
that the finest light will waver.
Your lips are bittersweet
as the root of love itself.

One by one
I hand you my secrets.
My fear of the color orange
and all its bold laughter.
A secret buried in a meadow
where no one goes.
How I tried to bind
two distant souls.
Each way I struggled
to force another to speak.
The stark night
when childhood vanished
in an instant.
Days my tires spun
in lost rotations
down a gravel road
far from home.
The shrinking blackout windows.
Shadows of a phantom figure.
The thorn caught in his beard.

A tremor shifts across my body
as I start to tell the secret
too scared to breathe.
Your eyes unblinking,
hover above me.
As you come closer,
for a kiss,
I can’t feel the soft wind
of your breath on my lips.

You wait and wait.

You press yourself
hard against me,
a ghost.

--Allison Creighton

(published in Winter Harvest: Jewish Writing in St. Louis, and in Drawing Down the Moon)