Alexa Doran
Dear Casey Kasem. No one deserves motherhood
but me. Lower your fist. scoff selfish. this is generosity. an offer to un-trough women’s destiny. Surely
you have space for a PSA. about my uterus-sized charity. Call me a cleaning service. I will rid kid
from every vagina’s vocabulary. This isn’t about you. abandoning children. it’s about giving women a
spin. unwalloped by semen. an exercise in honey. where some scuzz never mouth-breathes pussy.
over the ache of untrekked bodies. I am neither ocean nor linen. but I will lug myself to every
border. loop myself to every loom. if it means even one womb summers. without fear of having to
deliver. or turn to tattoo. I hear you now. though we’ve never spoken. you push the peach froth. of a
too-hot tea across the table and decree. worry dear is just. a form of a vanity.
Dear Casey Kasem. Assume I’m a harmonica.
edged bittered and slat-fed. a product of someone else’s breath. Assume you are the expanse I fill.
the mountain air I sedge. Now switch the image so I sit on my son’s bed and forgive you for
knowing. a voice could tow a life. could razzle fate like dice. I know you. don’t listen when I scream
the sunset. a slobber of sky behind my cry. I get it. I’m a monologue to which you didn’t subscribe.
That elevator chatter forced on every consumer trying to rise. Every night you dip away. a loose
canoe in a moon-barked lake. Every night I plug. where the peat serrates. the bash of shore where
you de-bay. but all I have is my alto. fanged without weight. a spill of wannabe haze. and it always
reverts to me as metal. as need. as hole with vibration or quake.
Alexa Doran’s full-length collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton Poetry Prize and was published by Bauhan Publishing in April 2021. 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 Passages North, Literary Mama, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Salt Hill Journal, among others. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website at alexadoran.com.
Return to September 2021 Edition
but me. Lower your fist. scoff selfish. this is generosity. an offer to un-trough women’s destiny. Surely
you have space for a PSA. about my uterus-sized charity. Call me a cleaning service. I will rid kid
from every vagina’s vocabulary. This isn’t about you. abandoning children. it’s about giving women a
spin. unwalloped by semen. an exercise in honey. where some scuzz never mouth-breathes pussy.
over the ache of untrekked bodies. I am neither ocean nor linen. but I will lug myself to every
border. loop myself to every loom. if it means even one womb summers. without fear of having to
deliver. or turn to tattoo. I hear you now. though we’ve never spoken. you push the peach froth. of a
too-hot tea across the table and decree. worry dear is just. a form of a vanity.
Dear Casey Kasem. Assume I’m a harmonica.
edged bittered and slat-fed. a product of someone else’s breath. Assume you are the expanse I fill.
the mountain air I sedge. Now switch the image so I sit on my son’s bed and forgive you for
knowing. a voice could tow a life. could razzle fate like dice. I know you. don’t listen when I scream
the sunset. a slobber of sky behind my cry. I get it. I’m a monologue to which you didn’t subscribe.
That elevator chatter forced on every consumer trying to rise. Every night you dip away. a loose
canoe in a moon-barked lake. Every night I plug. where the peat serrates. the bash of shore where
you de-bay. but all I have is my alto. fanged without weight. a spill of wannabe haze. and it always
reverts to me as metal. as need. as hole with vibration or quake.
Alexa Doran’s full-length collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton Poetry Prize and was published by Bauhan Publishing in April 2021. 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 Passages North, Literary Mama, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Salt Hill Journal, among others. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website at alexadoran.com.
Return to September 2021 Edition