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.---------
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