The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby by Alexa Doran

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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.

This selection comes from Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby, available from Bottlecap Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Kimberly Ann Priest.

Alexa Doran is the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019), and is currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Her series of poems about the women of Dada, “The Octopus Breath on Her Neck,” was recently released as part of Oxidant/Engine’s BoxSet Series Vol 2. You can also look for work from Doran in recent or upcoming issues of Glass, Mud Season Review, Conduit, and Permafrost, among others. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website at https://aed16e.wixsite.com/alexadoranpoet. Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021), Parrot Flower (Glass 2021), Still Life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (Finishing Line Press 2018). Winner of the New American Press 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Borderland and many others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Embody reader for The Maine Review. Find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.