Deidra Greenleaf Allan

Souvenir Shopping, Mykenos

browsing in the tourist shop
we watch nervously
as the owner shuts
the door
& lowers
the blinds
signaling us to wait

we don’t know why
until we hear
the chanting
glimpse the small coffin
being carried by

even here
among evil eye beads
& olive oil
it finds us

Border Crisis

Impaled
on the park’s iron fence
a deer
now lifeless sack
caught on the border
between woods and street

It must have struggled
as the spikes
worked in
hoofs windmilling
the air
eyes fixed on the dimming
refuge of trees

Ten years and I still see it
skewered mid-leap,
so close
to the safety it sought
but would never
quite reach

Deidra Greenleaf Allan has been published in American Poetry Review, Poetry Miscellany, Puerto del Sol, West Branch, and Quartet Journal, among other print and online journals. In 2001 she was selected as Montgomery County (PA) Poet Laureate by Robert Hass. She has received a Leeway Emerging Artist Award and was a finalist for a Pew Fellowship in poetry. One of her poems was selected in 2012 by Musehouse (in Philly) as its “Poem of Hope” poster.