Alexa Doran

When I tell my son DINKs are at the fair for nostalgia, he says Yo that’s deep

and I wonder what qualifies something as deep
for Gen Z, when in my world deep is a universal theme. 

Like how I still get angry that David’s Bridal fired me
for smoking weed, and at the soccer-scarred Bekki 

who snitched because I was sixteen and she still
moved like a goalie. Girl, yes, I’m petty. How else 

would I survive every popcorn-grease-stained year
loam-cupped in another lazy river, my son and I

snot-pathed in a lukewarm graph of happy couples
burbling baaaabe as their kids piss into the sky blue 

bath of chlorine and my tears? There are reasons
the eye outweighs the ovary. Birth has a way 

of being ordinary. Sight requires more rupture.
Who could measure the distance of its cleave? 

So what if I scan the surface and see the stubble
of every life I would have led if only I’d learned

to dream in white boy mediocrity? Of course,
I’m ashamed of the space that whirlpools empty 

around me, the vacancy that takes the shape of
wave on pee-plump wave, of the absolutely no

one to hand the car keys to, or to make sure
my son isn’t fucked over in the men’s room. 

When my son searches for his childhood where
should he seek? If it’s about depth, then he needs 

his own way to be above Tintern Abbey, his own
height at which to toe the human and the sacred 

like layers of holy beach. Maybe only a Ferris wheel,
with its rickety sense of eternity, can offer him a view 

poets mounted centuries ago with ease. Na. Fuck
seeing the world as stack, this existence is ocean, 

Wordsworth would agree. But if, for my son, the scale
is different, then who cares if my loneliness is a crisis                                                                                

and the circus whelm of an air beaten by wives antlered 

in men offering them forty-five refreshments is all the 911
dispatcher hears when I breathe? It’s romantic to love 

something lost. Like a gun, I need only my sights
to know how hollow the night, how buried the seed.

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Alexa Doran is the author of Exit Interview, forthcoming in 2026 from Galileo Press, as well as of the award-winning collection DM Me, Mother Darling (Bauhan 2021) and of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). She currently works as an Assistant Professor English at Tallahassee State College and reads fiction and creative non-fiction for CRAFT and Master’s Review. For a full list of her publications, awards and interviews please visit her website at alexadoran.com.