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

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Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby

On the nights when my body loves itself
enough to let it sleep

I lower myself into myself and pick a fight
with your memory,

never mind that you’re asleep right next to me,
your curls a comet of sparks spread

soft on the sheets, I’m just that gaga greedy –
but as I click back

through my mind trying to find
the nectarine cast of your throat

mid-laugh as I chase you
past the lace of shacks and moat

or to the cherry chaw of the morning I met you
your body a comma behind the Carolina dew,

my mind dives instead to 3:35 on the canopy road
driving because I need to cry

without facing you, or to the garage where I smoke
out the voice of the nursery school

saying you don’t fit in with the group.
Eventually I realize

I can’t let anything go
not even the bluegold beetles I keep seeing

on the side of the road. I don’t know

if they’re dead or the just the shed sac

of a body now afloat. It’s all volcano,
liquid shriek all around me, and I know

if I could just soak in the lavender spurt
of the laundry, or lose myself in the apple dream

of the grocery, I could stave off the lava,
keep alive the illusion of in utero. Instead I lie

a liquid berm burning beside your shadow.

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.