Cum Rag
[now that there is a cum rag I curl
around for comfort] I don’t need
the silver blubber of another purse.
Give me Gatsby or enough THC
to forget Tennessee. Yes, the only
proof I exist is plastered to a Target
top which stops midriff. Call it the
mar of a dialectic, call it sleeping
with garbage, we all have statues
who resist the seed of cement. Like
how my son watches your echo ash
my face. An eye shift only he can trace:
proof abuse has no before and after,
only a waver so nuclear it lives as gaze.
relapse
has its reasons like july slurred by the pop
of gas station hot dogs slogging down
the vendor’s grease-wormed silver logs
or the meatdetergent scent tied to a man
who knows how to upsell premium.
yes, it’s logic. one plus two plus trauma
now i percocet again. sometimes it’s always
vivaldi’s fourth season and there’s always
a name for the wind. mostly it’s church
without the architecture, without the pillars
or wine-smoke wick of incense, and everyone
thinks oh she’s a barbie boot masquerading
as an ashtray and oh look at her pink plastic throat
ember-thin. once, they taught us to celebrate,
to curlicue construction paper, to slick each
mitten in the soggy sparkle of snow. god, i want
there to be snow and nothing else. of course,
frost wrote fences make good neighbors.
he knew better than to pin this surrender. how
soft it is to fall in a groove that never ends.
Alexa Doran recently completed her PhD in Poetry at Florida State University. Her 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.
