All in by Alexa Doran

by Alexa Doran

I have not thought about death the way you have.
I have a disease that makes me vomit till I die.

Harnessed to the hospital bed, I try to tell my son
why I can’t be touched, why so many wires obstruct

what he has come to know as love.
Still. This, I think, is better than Tennessee.

Better than the Night Deposit gloom
I used to swoon to, better than the boy

who sighed I’m bored as I bared
my body, better than the drill of downtown

Clarksville on nights I put reefer aside to feel
the chill of moonshine. For once, I don’t

want to learn anything. I try to find a crescent
of skin he can cling to, slit the paper smock,

pretend I’m a robot, say that’s why the lights
blink blue. Last week, a pond gathered January

at its lips and we bent over it. The world was
many and we were two. Tonight, you count

the needle-stabbed scabs in my hand but
I can’t hear the numbers just the pond lap

the heady swirl of earth losing itself
in an hourless violet splash.

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Alexa Doran is the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). She 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. Her work also appears or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Mud Season Review, Salamander, Pithead Chapel, and New Delta Review, among others. For more, see https://aed16e.wixsite.com/alexadoranpoet.