The Truth About Tigers

This poem first appeared in The Awakenings Review, Spring 2026, Volume 13, Number 1.

There was a time,
a million years ago,
when I believed art
held some unique truth—
a breath beneath color.

I angled paintbrushes toward the sky
like telescopes,
searched headlines through a camera lens,
stood invisible on street corners
with a ghost-hungry journal.

I tore myself open—
self-inflicted reflections
spilled onto canvas,
staining darkroom floors,
always looking.

But then winter arrived
and I called off the search—abrupt.
Like the last shot fired
in a clean, well-lighted place.

What truths can you find
in five short years
of stick-figure drawings
and sloppy finger paint?

After I dropped the last shovel,
I briefly dug for meaning
beneath desert dogma,
but the ground split too wide
for a mind broken
but still skeptical—
too stubborn for feel-good bullshit
or vague deity threats.

Once, I took a poetry class
with a teacher who meant well.
She was kind. Talented.
But when she said,
To be a good writer,
you sit at the computer and bleed,
my eyes rolled so far back
I saw the past.

Me—alone in a room of books,
loving Hemingway the most.

If you’re going to modernize a stolen quote,
at least credit the dead man
who suffered it first.

Not that I’m above theft.
For a decade,
I wore a borrowed smile,
stretched over my face like cheap fabric,
just to dodge that empty concern,
Are you okay?—
a dumb question with an easy answer
I learned the old-fashioned way.

Eventually, the smile became my own.
And maybe there was truth to be found
somewhere—
but I’m not going to tell you about that.

Because even if clichés
sometimes crack open the dark,
you wouldn’t want to see them here.

— Nick Allison