Like most of us writers, Nikki Allen started to write whenever she was old enough to pick up a pen. The words she writes are inspiring. (I would compare them to a ripe peach, juicy: delicious, and you cannot get enough.) Recently a runner up in the Eli Coppola Poetry Chapbook Contest, Allen is one of Pittsburgh’s shining stars. And she finds inspiration all over our city:
What is your favorite spot in the city?
Frick Park. It’s nice to go and bolt to the woods when I’m feeling hectic. Shadow Lounge is my home base.
When and where do you write? Do you set a daily writing goal?
I write while I’m at work a lot of the time. Or, I like to go to a bar or coffee shop, to get away from my house and get writing done.
What is the hardest part of writing for you?
It was a love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of thing. The hardest part is staying connected without being critical. I treat my poems like a horrible lover: I am really into them one minute and lose interest the next.
What advice would you give aspiring writers?
Don’t stop writing. If that is what you have to do, then find a way. A lot of it is timing, a lot of it is writing. Don’t be ashamed of it.
When You Are Leaving, Everything Seems Important
A young woman is forty-two minutes late to a party she doesn’t want to attend. She has managed to tug on one heel, a skirt and a withered yellow bra, and she is smoking a joint—a badly rolled sad example of a roach, but pinches of weed nonetheless. There is Bob Dylan playing in the background.
The traffic is stupid because the evening is tipping over into the social hour—bars are spilling their pockets onto the sidelines because you can no longer smoke indoors here. They serve food and it’s a law, and no one is bitching about it really because the weather is standable. The pigeons are somewhere being pigeons. A phone rings and conversations turn the air into a jigsaw.
A boy changes a light bulb for his mother. The stool he climbs on is rusted but enough. In the front yard, his father sits in the grass writing down more proof of the moon status. Position, brightness, pregnancy term. He licks his thumb and raises it, blots out a distracting star and
the wind cools wetness. Tomorrow he will have a letter for breakfast, the interstate for lunch.
The young woman tries to remember her activities twenty-four hours ago. She stands with her back to the ashtray and peels a singular orange. This is the only reason to grow out your nails.
Minute hand moths tick against light bulbs on every porch, each street, every neighborhood. If anyone says they’re listening, they’re lying.
A young couple presses goodbye into the spot of streetlight at the end of the block. There are kisses built on beer breath and a slow urgency. Some would argue the best kind. The kind that brand the hippocampus. One half of the couple is leaving, promising to return. They will not. Of course, sometimes knowledge only stems as far as we can throw it; even telepathy could not clue them in. Their clairvoyant friend, the one with too many rings and never enough ones to
buy a round, tells them they will marry in the woods. Vows beneath bird nests. Ignorance is a prediction. It’s the way their fingers hang on just one more second as they walk apart. Like the whole world knows but they do not.
There is a heart clicking in the distance beneath sleep, beneath synthetic sounds of an ocean plugged into the wall. REM, all good things. Watery, transcendent. The clocks are cloudy and the window is open.
