“Are you writing about what you want to be writing about?” –Alexander Chee
Allie Rigby has roots in the chaparral and deserts of California. She is the author of Moonscape for a Child, published by Bored Wolves in 2024, and she’s a recipient of a Fulbright grant to Romania. Her writing explores health, climate change, ecology, and community, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020.
Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Allie, what poems have you brought for us today?
Poem as Ghost Ally
I don’t have a place to curse
not one
city or habitat that did not
snap crackle pop
me open. High school
was fine, dust-coated woodrats
hide in what remains
of Peters Canyon.
One day
I was a college kid
studying climate change & art
history exploring hemlock
& beech forests in the East
running cross-country
(shout-out to the odd little ducks
were you one to miss your familiars?)
California baby
lap after lap
it was the smells I missed
most in Waterville, Maine
the dust yerba santa
sand pits & oak woodland
the chaparral & oil
scrubland black sage joy.
I’d run for creosote clumps
for lupine or for poppies.
One day I stopped running
and sat on the cement
and cried beneath the chapel
cried a good cry
and I haven’t stopped
feeling bad since. Left
for California moved up Hwy 1
and lived with some hippies
taught ecology and
felt interconnected too.
With friends I traveled
to the desert one spring
and thought life was good
as good as it gets
but the group fell apart
as good things do
or at least I think it did
but now I’m not so sure
what’s in my head,
how things tend
to get weird. I still find
love in unexpected
places and though the world
is on fire, it is still a world
worth loving. If you’re still
reading this
remember that I did believe
in ghosts. How one dawn
in Bloomington, my sister
and I heard boots heavy
on the stairs and we froze
in survival. But there
was no body attached
to the body
and we were so scared
and I felt more alive
than I had in years.
---
For the Hole in Fonda
My grandfather’s brother shot himself
in the family barn during the Great Depression.
He looks sad in the one photo, checked out
like he knew what was coming.
Must have been pretty quiet in Fonda, long
Iowa winters, owls flying stiff over cornfields
that’s what I picture—trembling stalks,
ethanol boom or bust. I found out by accident
as kids do and now when I am swinging down
I think of Earl and the hundreds of Earls
and wish I could have helped but really what is
mine is not mine: the gravitational
pressure of prairie air and shoveled steps
added up for Earl, and it is the same
sodded dirt in California sometimes and I am
no farmer, not now, not yet—
not that tough for it really and besides
I fear everything.
I am no owl.
---
Late March
She can hear the coyotes
from her porch. A neighborhood
on fire, we howl
like dogs, God’s dogs,
and somewhere deep
in oak woodland chaparral
they hear us too,
and she prays
they howl back.
---
Orange Peel
I spoke
one tone
last night
as I do
when sad—
like a dog.
It’s been a lot.
I am fine.
A lamp in dust
still works.
Hard to read
much this March.
I peel fruit now
like a lemur
eyes open
for asteroids.
You're listening to the poems of Allie Rigby on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
