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

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Motherhood (Exhibit A)

God gave me my anger as a gift and now
I only want the pity of a martini.

Mothers we cannot expect to maintain
our melt. I preach release but my dad used

to fold foil into wands so I could

fairy and I still only believe, but
could never be, magic. I know how

to hold my hit in while my son searches
the groove in my breast, burned by a pot

seed when I was 16, for the just sprigged
parts of me, for the blossoms to bunch

to his teeth. The chapped daisies of my hands
sap his dream. I say This is how you sleep

I say dissolve your brain from your body
I say you may not recognize mommy

on the other side of reality.
And this is where he giggles says it’s easy

as if nothing is inevitable

as his cheek giving the moon a surface to be.

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.