Allegra Wilson

Having never lived alone I now find I’m afraid that

I will die with my ringer off on a Tuesday night
and no one will know until Sunday at 5pm. That if I’m not
overlay, penline, craft glue, then I’m pencil tracings
erased from gray paper. What is a speaker called

when they become silent? What is the difference
between loneliness and aloneness, give or take
a vowel? Once, gossip benches were built for comfort
and conversation on a corded telephone. But what is true

self without solitude? Untended. Unbearable. I cannot bear
the weight of me, even as I smallen (a tense topic, thorned
like the grasses I haul into my house so their smell
can bring me back to my body). I draw myself

smiling again and again. Paper over my body
until it is thicker than ever with wheat paste
and poster. I add shades of concern for depth,
turn a mouth corner slant to evoke

vulnerability. I bind myself in a book so dense
that affection can never get through. At tea one friend
tells another that she wears a special hat at home
to request quiet time from her partner while I unfold

a newspaper from my future where the headline
says that this is a problem I will never be concerned
with again. The radio plays my song. I’m singing
a ballad through one hundred charcoal sketches  

of my smile. They paper over my drawn mouth.

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Allegra Wilson (she/her) is a writer living in Northern California. Her chapbook, song & ruins, received the 2025 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award, selected by Stacey Waite. She is the author of a micro-chapbook, sex party at the opera house (Whittle Micro-Press) and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, MAYDAY, ANMLY and elsewhere.