Alice in the Cloister

Allison Hutchcraft

ALICE IN THE CLOISTERS

One by one, pale suns shimmy up the walls,
and Alice counts the hours like a tongue
 
counts teeth. To fall asleep
in the lap of a paling sarcophagus, the body
 
stretched horizontal and nearly her height,
a stone dog lying loyal at their feet.
 
It’s no surprise she wants to try on all
the pope’s jackets resting quiet behind glass,
 
slip on enameled rings, shed her shoes and peer
straight into the sacristy. In the monastic gardens,
 
she loses her shadow amid the wattle of fences
and lady’s bedstraw, each plot another diamond
 
of thinning lovage and shallot, milk thistle and rue.
Then all that cowslip, love-in-a-mist,
 
the poison plants of mandrake and deadly
nightshade, raised by invisible hands.
 
Isn’t this the everything she nearly
wanted, mirage of the Hudson widening below
 
into white plain, the scanty light and birds
flitting through?
 
Here’s her hour, her branch that could just
fit a dove—
 
Serfdom, fiefdom, barley and rye:
with Alice, everything eventually goes
 
out the window, through
the paint-cracked door.
 
 
 
 

ALLISON HUTCHCRAFT’s first poetry collection, Swale, was named Editor’s Choice by New Issues Poetry & Prose and is forthcoming in 2020. Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and The Southern Review, among other journals. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.