Alison Moncrieff writes, paints, sews clothes, collects rocks, and tends to chickens & children in Oakland, California. She is the author of the chapbooks don draper checks the window (dancing girl press, 2017) and Cherrystem (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her writing has appeared in The East Bay Review, Entropy, Rivet Journal, The Manifest Station, and Bay Area Generations.
Visit www.alisonmoncrieff.com or @alimoncrieffpaints on Instagram
pluck
Go home and do something about the eyebrows!
(the baby’s onesie says fuck you)
every time i chew a handful of aspirin i think of perry,
& whenever i sit with a starbucks i think of adrianna.
an old man on the street says, They make you look like a man!
i smelled the mountain from the stop light, scanned the horizon.
i found some snapshots of life before: a backyard baseball diamond
& 3 old women gazing at an infant. what were they saying?
(the news was bad - i was wearing a Self-Esteem brand t-shirt.)
i sometimes throw away something made of metal,
a bent needle or a screw belonging to a lost machine.
how wasteful in the face of my ancestors
who stroked out horses on the walls of a flickering cave,
who hoarded red rubber bands from newspapers
on the turns of their bedposts.
i like to think of roger as someone i might run into in a cafe.
he’d appreciate the job i am doing as a parent, and he'd want to fuck me.
but instead of saying what she thinks she ingests what he said,
and she starts to feel like and think that she looks like a man.
then he’d send me on my way. i don’t remember life before,
but there was a doe whose leg was stuck in the chain link fence.
blood drying on woven steel, bone exposed, she wouldn’t stay still.
she didn’t understand chainlink.
sitting on the end of a diving board, i remember barb,
and as i rip off the top of a stevia packet i think of lydia
look at the straight white man lording it over the food chain in the science book.
and my friend approaching the doe, protection woven in red at the edges of her clothes.
my favorite word had been pony, but it was gone.