Eleven O’Clock

by Suzanne Allen


The church bells feel like rain drops off an awning, taste like coins flung into a fountain. Wishes. Charity wishes for nothing more than close attention, prefers to go slowly, balance the weight of herself, the heft of her thoughts as she not-quite lumbers and glides along, smell every sound. The sum of her love, more given than garnered. Her heart hums, more, more, more.


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Suzanne Allen is a writing teacher and artist born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from California State University in Long Beach, where she still lives. In 2021, she published a full-length collection of mostly pandemic poems, We Wash Our Hands, and her collection of Paris poems, Awkward, was released in February, 2024. Others appear widely online and in print. The “Charity” sequence is part of a larger series of self-caricatures from her forthcoming collection, Attempts at Exhausting a Crush, to be released late spring, 2025.