Kara Dorris

Excerpts from FOR & AGAINST SARA

Sara says, you have two choices inflight: cease to exist

or become yourself stripped of distractions.
Overnight flight to Poland; I wake,
every few minutes or hours I can't tell,
but each time I lose: That last dinner with my family.
My fortune cookie said swim, don't wait for
your boat to come in. My mother's fortune:
if you already own someone's heart, don't take
their soul too. It starts early; she took us
to see Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
My six year old brother went to the bathroom
by himself. She panicked when he didn't return,
but he was happily watching Darth Vadar
reveal himself at another screen.
This is the definition of depression:
too tired to gather up her baby girl for a trip
to the restroom. But in the depression before the panic,
she is beautiful, just loneliness holding my hand.
He always wandered off, she said,
but you never did.

*

Almost there, Sara says, hearts her fist & punches

I hush, always, as if hush is the matter
that created my brain, but the hush inside is the same
as the hush in a plane, a muffle. Sara understands,
yet doesn't acknowledge these delays
from my eye input to my brain, the static between
spoken to & speaking–hush: is a directional degree.
The hush of driving past oil derricks.
The hush at the end of the line between powering off & on.
The hush at takeoff when airflow stops & breaths hold.
Hush for me like that. Sara says, let's be insubstantial,
but I've never been a non-utilitarian delight.

*

Only you can you pass your own street three times, Sara says

Three times I had to say, no, not this turn.
What no one knows: We were slouched down kissing,
me & my first boyfriend. His mom was driving.
Every time I peeked, it was never my street.
Never a name I recognized as if the street sign
was as buried as I was. You could pass your own
again & again & never know. I asked Sara, can you mourn
someone you've never known? The street we live on
in St. Petersburg is under construction,
a face-lift I can't trust. If it can't recognize itself
how can I? Not even a church escapes plastic surgery,
only its onion top reaching for heaven & failing
gives me direction. Buried, I think of my mother,
how when you cover yourself, you begin to hate.

*

We're always open & decomposing, Sara says

The trans-Siberian train only leaves Moscow
at night. The station is domed, an upside down
pool–once I stepped into a pool's deep end,
I stood under & waited for my mother.
We board. The train is a waiting room of vodka,
cocaine, & fortune tellers. The compartment doors
don't lock because you can't pass vodka
or read palms through a locked door.
I keep my palms clinched. Once
I told my mother, you're sad because you think
you should always be happy, always be finished.
Does she believe me? Sara says it doesn't matter.
That to get out of drowning you have to breathe,
& that's how you drown–you open, you flood.

*

You can be the virgin & the whore, Sara says

I search my uneven body, but can't be the myth
I never was. I finger my tumors through muscle,
name & map: this knot discovered rolling past
Lake Baikal. All roads lead inside
like all roads in Moscow lead to Red Square.
I'd rather scrape the deposits of bone, the chunks
of in the way. Calcium hold us up, & I wish it was enough,
but it tumbles us down as well. It molds us
like a stray backhand. Even as I surgery this
or that lump away, it knows. This task is impossible.

*

Sara says, you're a terrible good liar

When I twist my claddagh ring & trace my curved scars,
I know I miss home, I tell Sara. The subconscious mind doesn't lie.
But at home, who am I? Natalia, our attendant, doesn't like us
unless we're drunk on cheap vodka, when our languages,
ages, & freedoms are wasted. For years
she has lived on the train, crossing & re-crossing Russia–
we aren't the same. But we both pretend
to move forward & end up leaving the way we came.

Kara Dorris is a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas. She received her MFA from New Mexico State University in 2009. Her poetry has appeared in The Tusculum Review, The Tulane Review, Harpur Palate, Wicked Alice, Cutbank, Prick of the Spindle, Stone Highway Review, Crazyhorse and Sk idrow Penthouse among others literary journals, as well the anthology Beauty is a Verb. Dancing Girl Press published her first chapbook, Elective Affinities, in 2011. Finishing Line Press published her second chapbook, Night Ride Home, in 2012. She is the editor of an online literary journal, Linger post.