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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Neighbors Invite Us To Church

and lest we forget the petrified
look on my face the downtown
sprinklers ajazz all around me, my son
more abuzz than June
on the concrete,

let us conjure the fear that freckled my face that day.

How many of us crumple
as if God were a gust that could knock us down
with an accident of touch?
I am not sure

I want my son to see that side of Him

– his feet tucked beneath a pew,
his tongue tucked beneath a hymn –

when right now God is everything.

I still want him
to feel the thorn glut his forehead to stich his skin
nail-numb to loop his mouth around
the language of crucifixion

but at what cost the blazer buried
prayer the pulpit plunk resounding
louder than the robin
beak drilling song into air?

My son’s face puddles in the fountain’s reflection
a trillion versions of him

blend and dreg.
I nod politely and say
I will never be ready to give religion
circumference

let God be
a lily pad instead
a pulse on the water
a point of departure

: a green without end.

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.

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I Am Failing You

Here, you can see it in my hands the
way when air fails smoke it wends ash.
A mother’s silence has velocity, wing
speed and at thirty I am still learning
to speak. I say hurdle but mean throat.
I mean sincerely you can jump right
over me, stun me with dust and I will
still bunny-go. Son I already have so
many roles. Dust buster, kiss crafter,
forever disciple of my dance teacher
Ms. Trudeau. I know. I know. Morning
becomes a chalice when least expected
so why can’t I resurrect into something
you can sip on the go? My mother used
to pause the screen on all the ice skating
queens as they waited for their number
to glow – you can’t fake grace – there!
Watch her sparkle shot lips fold, her too
big eyes glimpse God, her bun twitch
against the faux snow. What I mean is
climb up on the moss with me. As equals
in this quiver of ether, we can bereave the
mother-child trope. What I mean is melt
into the peat, use your ankles to breathe,
the bog is not a (b)rink for us to glacier
each other’s heat – No. it doesn’t matter
in what order we grow. Graze your first
taste of champagne, now
touch your toes.

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.