Friday Mar 29

AlexaDoran Alexa Doran is a poet, a mother, and a PhD student at FSU. She has recently been featured or is forthcoming in  CALYX, The Pinch, Gertrude Press, The James Franco Review, Juked and Posit literary magazines. Alexa’s poetry about Dada artist Emmy Hennings recently won first place in the Sidney Lanier Poetry competition.
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To My Son, Who Just Heard Me Scream Fuck


and turned to me for a hug, I’m sorry I keep confusing
me for the goddess of electricity. Imagine your mama

in charge of the parse of light and dark, lightning bolts
shivering down both arms whenever I want the night

to sputter or the sky to rip apart. To unleash
myself in a vector of heat - Son I am angry

that I am not the sun that reaches your cheeks.
I am f-star furious that I can’t blend those binaries,

And yes this is about more than astronomy (although
you have to agree that as a star I would hang

but perfectly) This is about America’s hard-on
for atrocity, and your mama’s sugar/fire/need

to plug those geysers of white male greed. It’s true.
I infringe. I jostle. I say irrevocable things.

All to cage you in. You see I think I can make you
forget I don’t fibrillate the wind. Son, the way

condensation clasps the glass is how I will rise
inevitably to the surface of your life –

not as some womb of weather, snow cocked
like a weapon, but silent as the brine that coats

your tendons, as the grope of muscle to skin.




They want you to sleep in a different bed


Oh, Buggy that’s where it begins
       the clunk of the crimson paneling
you bang against my face the lover
       you tell me tastes like mocha so
much bean froth between her legs
     it drips like cloth like lace.
I know what they all say. They think
   I am easily replaced. How quickly
the pink shoot of your mouth will fade
   from the fountain of my nipples
and fasten to some Queen
     who has forgotten who holds the Ace,
the one who gave your first taste
     of female flesh and wombscape.
I’ve already found the rags
   stiff with your sixteen-year-old semen,
already listened to you leaving
   the whoosh of a zipping gym bag
the cell phone flat against your face
     already cleaving all I have
of you; this space. I don’t want
     to have to meet you on the page.
I want the warm bustle
       of your body to bank against me,
the sheets spread out like waves.




Directions for Deity Selection 101


If my son has to believe in something
             besides me let it be

                                     one of those red
breasted birds, those Bible bright medallions

         crimson with longing   soaring baubles

of lava above us.           Let him crow cock
             diesel as the cockatiels,

see God as feathers, as armor, as something you can feel.

As real as a mouth
             on my back? he asks

and God knows this is His lot

             to welt the room with His wingspan

to stand back, a petunia smothered
                               in the background of a photograph

unassuming as awning

           while my son’s tongue glints
against the morning
         grass        
                 ferned in dirt
tasting a dandelion

                                   toes licking each lobe of earth

                 and those hands dig-digging

a murmur 
                         swallowed in the river’s gloam and churn