Alexa Doran
a student asks if it’s about Grief
It’s January and I am teaching my son how to give up. He watches the gnarl of the hospital bed
for my breath, the paper bib a misplaced wing, heaven rising and not rising from my ribs.
*
I believed so many things about myself. about dragging men into graveyards to kiss them. about dreamsicle martinis mucousing the counter. I thought love had outlines everyone could see. that we all made snow angel impressions. that everyone was seven and staying in the body-dug depression as long as could be.
*
sometimes when I give up it has a different color than surrender. there is nothing to magenta or throb, just end.
then sometimes I’m inhaling a swing set covered in snow.
*
now, I make pink-aisled love to your absence and call it home.
*
last month, I named every light which washed his face. I traced nudge of ocean melt, Airbnb monoglow, overhead Subaru cop-kind fluorescent marrow. I wanted the shades drawn over me.
*
I tell my son that people in New York are more alive. They have to be.
My son knows this lesson the way butterflies know winter.
*
He has asked me to kill him. He has asked me to listen. He has watched convulsion migrate the length of my face.
*.
God hears us. Electric chill across a saw.
God puts his mouth to our vibration and purrs.
*
Fuck all thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird.
Where do you think a mother hurts?
Alexa Doran
Alexa Doran recently completed her PhD in Poetry at Florida State University. Her fulllength 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.