by Alexa Doran
When I finally realize it’s how soil drinks
which makes it fertile or fucked
I give up my belief you’ll ever trade Grey
Goose for my love.
You could not hold my father’s quiet.
Your heavy metal anger
boomboxed to my shoulder, each beat
a gnarl closer to the night
you let me lean into the Camel-dapple
of your ear, the curl-dark
of your hair, only to leave the cold
of the creek, the raw soak
of my feet to bruise the loam,
no words, just the scatter
of willow in the wake of your shadow.
I don’t believe in Revelations
but I want to. I want disciples
in the shafts, a galactic response to
your wrath, God to shiver through
the lilacs. No need
for the splashes of fire. I want God
to see who we’d be without
the discovery of a way to burn
the wet, to bomb, to gun, to Hansel
& Gretel our death. Maybe, in a space
where only stars know to explode,
you’ll regret silence and its oceans,
will swap the vodka singe for the kids’
song slow seed by seed row by row. Still
my hands will dig. If only to touch
that sky where you leaned in, let go.
::
Alexa Doran recently completed her PhD in Poetry at Florida State University. Her full-length collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was published in April 2021 (Bauhan). She is also the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). You can look for work from Doran in recent or upcoming issues of Pleiades, Witness, Massachusetts Review, pidgeonholes, NELLE, and Gigantic Sequins, among others. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website at alexadoran.com.
Image: imso gabriel
Image description: two small green sprouts growing in brown soil.
Psaltery & Lyre 