Kara Dorris
You say, remember: language shivers away
from whatever it names. That's how we learn
to justify leaving, our failure's heartburn.
Our breaths mystify the known. We paint
our names across elevated train tracks,
a rite of passage: we were here. Tomorrow
the town will whitewash us, but we'll know
beneath the white squares wait white lilacs,
shining lilacs that double as our wings.
We fell, from fallen-ness comes friction:
be burnished meat-hooks & feathered lures
or whitewashed, to-get-lost-in detours.
But even the puncture we fall through endures
our fall, & everyone is a puncture.
* * *
Wonder & repetition—you should know:
the world always repeats itself. Hunger
doused & lit. You, all satisfied & aglow.
Our bodies just scaffolding spurred
towards completion. When you complete
anything you're awed by sedated need.
Order led you to it. Need-object-eat.
Repeat. We need our bodies. Maybe
the first love we knew is the formation
of ourselves. Form is more than we know—
the marriage of our music & seeing. Shape
more than muscle & fat tissue bestowed.
Grace more than the marriage of our bones
& the galaxies we choose to know.
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.
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