Ali Beheler

The Whole Year, Fallboard Down

Yes, it’s possible to forget you even have one,
alarm cutting in every morning, flung arm, and then
just finding a clean dish for cold cereal, your stomach
but a bowl. The filled sink. Calling through the din
of rushed shower: your skin. The child, the dog, perhaps,
your tongue, leaf edging slightly in brown. The sounds
you hear over ones you don’t. The car’s two minutes to warm
before you nearly forget to lift the garage door. Soon you’re
speeding past all the raised branches, the lids of your eyes,
up like stop signs. The slight rise in heat at core, the flood
of light, hole of iris widening, the other reason why. So deep
as nothing deeper, marrow in caverns of bone, air in caves
of lung. Eighty-eight places to fit ten fingers, the quiver string
wrapping the world. Machine in a dark spot. How she can sing.  

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Ali Beheler’s recent work appears in SRPR, Rogue Agent, Harpur Palate, Tupelo Quarterly, ballast journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Willows Wept and elsewhere. Winner of the SRPR Editor’s Prize (2024) and the Milton J. Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry (2025), she has received residencies at Sundress Publications (SAFTA, 2025) and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony (2022, 2023). She teaches at Hastings College in Hastings, NE, where she lives with sweet Emmylou. Find her at www.alibeheler.com.