Austin Allen

Current Event

This is the way we all knew it was going.
Although the charts insisted otherwise,
the stream broke hard and murmured, in its flowing,
This is the way. We all knew it was going
too fast, though torn by stones, smoothing and slowing
just as the view dropped off before our eyes.
This is the way we all knew it was going,
although the charts insisted otherwise.

Austin Allen’s debut poetry collection, Pleasures of the Game (Waywiser, 2016), was awarded the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His poetry has recently appeared in the Yale Review, 32 Poems, the Missouri Review, and the Sewanee Review. He is currently a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati.