Poetry by Alexa Doran

                        nick furs CC




​Dear Casey Kasem. I haven’t seen a pear gash 

since. my son gasped. to life on the lanai. since flesh became mirror. I no longer need. a juice revealed. a life halved. Yet I feel. as if the world has forgotten how to trickle. has lost. the art of eking out. The 2 PM sun is joining us. It’s mad. it traded fucking for photosynthesis. I thought you would know. what to do. You are so good at choosing. Mr. Kasem, I bend. the night like others bend a spoon. I grovel. I want. numbers to be real. the way fruit is real. by rotting. I want proof. I am 22. Yes say. Number 39 like it’s the gold. shellac of a lifeline. Dangle that shit. like Mariah dangles the high notes on her chart hits. Make the sun feel. the grace of osmosis. Join me. just this once. let my son feel. the wisp of radio static. save him. from a world hell. bent on measuring everything. in moss. sized increments. Nothing but the forest. to map ourselves. against.





​Dear Casey Kasem. I approach not. 

as clouds but as cumulate. as flash of igneous. You will laugh. when I say lava made me like this. You will not think. shot through. not imagine hollowed out. I don’t need a fucking. therapist. I need a voice. lonely and whiskied. to slalom the distance. to log rain-fat hours in the cider scent. of my kitchen. You never have to leave. the studio. I am willing to be loved. via microphone. Touch is so. overblown when what. enters the ear enters the soul. Closer to the brain they say. I will find node after node. twitching and delicate. as sherbet whole roads. which will lead to the child I left. at the beach where those boys ate my virginity. Their eyes aisles to every hole.

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Alexa Doran is currently working on her PhD in Poetry at Florida State University. Her full-length collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton Poetry Prize and will be published by Bauhan Publishing in Spring 2021. 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 Passages North, Literary Mama, Pithead Chapel, THE BOILER, and Harvard Review, among others. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website at alexadoran.com.

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