like me: white girl doughy, Pez dispenser of quotes
by men who’d rather I was dead, fuck you think you are

loving Malcolm X. Not that you’re wrong but romance
has other tunes, tizzies and shimmies you override

when all you hear is the glut of your semen’s tide.
You love this place. The shatter of February

balanced against our booth, the egg warm air
capillaried in coffee and the grease fleck of fumes.

In this moment I’m below you like a mountain
below ax-hot snow, an anvil who’s learned to bury

its tip in a blanket, to forgo. Not sure how to shift
when all I feel is the slap of distance, the gasp

of vinyl as it rips beneath each twist of our hips.
Besides what good are hips if all they bear are dicks

and kids? Not this silence. Not the daffodil quill
of bile I dry heave in the girl’s room while you

scroll through your i-tunes. Not this dream where
I’m what Fox News told you I could be or the miter

I used to solder you to me. I once believed sharpened
the future tense of glistened and if you could just see

me as gentle then who’d care if I was invisible or heavy
metal or anything but your scum, your resin, your spittle.

Alexa Doran recently completed her PhD in Poetry at Florida State University. Her full-length collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was published in April 2021 (Bauhan). 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 Pleiades, Literary Mama, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Salt Hill Journal, and Gigantic Sequins, among others. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website at alexadoran.com.