Love Poem

Basie Allen

                                                                               when I hear those whispers moon                                                          out your crescent mouth                                    dressed in criminally                        innocent smiles                     cracked open                  so culprit laugher                 like crooked stars snapping their points off              for the pawn shop re-up                I re-so fall            in love        with you        again        everyday  melt beside your free-so tongues  so side-effect wild abandoned train track          grass gorgeous       dry aqueduct perfect       the way metal has learned to rust                        in order to make it back to nature                                         I wonder too if you can see me rusting                                         tryna make it home to the nature in you                             talk-to-me-nice       you say                                          under suck-tooth missives                                                                        shucked from night-shells                                                                           so under the beak                                                                           I’m learning                     es lo mismo so que             wince pleasure        sweetest pain     first sips from fridge-cold mezcal pero la vina es so simplemente major or so I’ve heard   when we met               I brought flowers I picked from in between the city’s missings         lilies and wild tulips with haikus            cute shit                 written about the way I wanted to so and so                    sweet with you                       and you                                 cause I thought I was a bad nigga                                      and I wanted you to too                                                  but you brought a bouquet of stolen thunder                                                             from some hush-now-babied lightning storm                                        cause only you                                              the most oouu’est baddy                                                                   te so amo-sote                                                                                                   know how to talk a cloud                                                                                                                                    into giving away

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Image of Basie Allen

Basie Allen is a poet and visual artist from New York City’s Lower East Side. His work carves parentheses in-between dirt and feeling. In 2020 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Psychic Cartography” is included in MoMA/P.S.1’s Homeroom series of online publications.

Cover of Palm-Lined with Potience

New York, New York

Palm-Lined with Potience is New York City poet and visual artist Basie Allen's debut collection of poems. Basie's work is by turns political and lyrical, charting both physical and emotional landscapes, making maps of paintings and paintings of maps. While rooted in Pro-Black theory, art, and precise description, Basie makes space in the ekphrastic for the eerie and abstract. The poems in this collection search for nodes of truth in a tumultuous sea of fractured facts.

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