Robert Allen

Robert Allen teaches writing and literature at Eastern Florida State College. He began experimenting with poetry while completing a BA in journalism at Ohio Northern University, which may help explain why his poetic inclinations often tend toward an economic and observational style. He continued working on his own writing while completing an MA in English at Stetson University in Deland, Florida.

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► Robert Allen's microchap & selected poems are available below. Download the single-page PDF by clicking the title.

Origami Microchap

The Sea Witch

Click title to download microchap

Robert Allen BioCVR The Sea Witch 2023

Cover design by JanK

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I find the sea witch
where she carefully digs
into the dunes
for stillborn sea turtles,
decaying
in their lumpy eggs—
which she collects
and cans
for their healing power.

The moon
manipulates the tides,
she says, gesturing
with an upturned palm
toward the waves;
the same force,
she says,
manipulates me.

III

She lives
where the pines grow
high, dry, and thin—
and she walks there,
her skin under the sun,
the way she wants
with no one watching.

She dances,
a strange sway
to my uninitiated eye,
as I watch
from the shadows,
wary of the light
she emits.

She eats raw,
smooth shapes
slit open,
dripping with juice:
sticky, clear—
clear as can be
for her to collect.

I realize now:
we’ve already met,
years ago in a hushed hall
where she offered to read
the lines on my hand—
long before she emerged,
a peculiar moth, flying freely,
indifferent to the glow
of all others.

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Poets