After Forgiveness, by Alayna Powell

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Your ex is a bird. A turtle. Half-priced at PetSmart. Your houseplants are hoarding knowledge and sending mixed signals. Desire is a ghost in your home, and the rooms are bare, and the window open, and always, you see a deer out of the corner of your eye.

After Forgiveness is a testament to all that love takes and leaves behind. Journeying between past and present, obsession and spite, Powell’s poems meld dream with reality in an attempt to imagine an after. A mother heals from cancer. The drug use slows, and then stops altogether. But when it is all over, where do we put our toes, tongue, teeth? The anger that, by now, has turned to blame? What do we do with the love that lingers, pulsing, in an empty room? These poems turn to the spiritual world, to plants, to prayer, demanding answers.

Alayna Powell (she/they) is a biracial Black writer, with roots along the Southern East Coast, as well as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She writes poetry, short fiction, and book reviews, which are featured online in Poetry Foundation, The Bangalore Review, Tinderbox Magazine, and elsewhere. Powell is a 2020 Zoeglossia fellow and an MFA student at the University of Alabama. She is the upcoming Poetry Editor for Black Warrior Review and is also pursuing a certificate in Archival Studies.