Kirstin Allio
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Everything I do
I’m told
I’d gotten separated from my life. That was the only explanation for the way I felt ventureless, featureless. A voice told me to take a vacation but I couldn’t think of a single one.
I could only think that we must have been living parallel lives. Which one of us was the metaphor? A median strip between us, not a migration corridor. Which one of us would risk our lives to cross the freeway?
Kirstin Allio won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her new story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children, coming out in 2024. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press), Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc). Her awards and honors include fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She lives in Providence, RI.