Interview with Wendy Darling, Channel 9 News
Reporter Can you tell us what you saw outside your window?
Wendy I don’t expect you to follow what fades. In fact, only lovers follow that path
Reporter Can you describe the image you saw?
Wendy A blade in the butter. Sky gash. The warble in star space.
Reporter Is this your first experience
with this kind of sight?
Wendy I feel him in the whale bone soap bar around my navel. In the cool lemonade dripped
from the sun. I feel him in the prayer crouched on my lips. His hymn coats my tongue.
Reporter Please return your tongue to your mouth. So what you saw a-hum in the London sky was
a him?
Wendy him/her pronouns are just another way to blur
like his wings after his shadow fell to earth
a bastion, a bastion
Reporter Would you consider yourself a) on drugs
b) under a spell
c) unsure but willing to pull Spring across your tongue?
Wendy I consider
a.) what we have a covenant.
b.) The North Star a great hurrah of cancer and dust.
c.) Him who will never hanker to be human.
Reporter Was this pronoun stripped poltergeist alive or dead?
Wendy Life is not paginated.
Reporter Do you think you will see this…apparition…again?
Wendy
(oh space is shuffling around her now. She should never have worn this blue dress. There are so
many beams in this room. So many sun lost shards of light. So many reasons to just rip off this
nightgown. Peter would hate her for talking about)
Reporter Wendy! Will you see anything
outside your window again?!
Wendy Enough with your foolish questions. I am the last lion you want out of its den.
Interview with Dada Desperada Suzanne Duchamp
re: Bouquet, 1940
What kind of bouquet does a bullet make?
a bullseye of petaled flesh: the sunflower split
like a pinwheel
its circular tunnels echo
pollen and dread.
Why paint one rim red?
We can’t count on cornerstones
<even my heart is a ripple>
and so I chose red as an edge
because the fish are gulping
the same hours and I wanted to capture their breath.
Why dream of pilots?
Who said I dream
my mouth is a runway
slick with your wheels
I know throats have shades or shelfs
of bloom so I recorded a cross
section of neck-blossom-no-beard.
Why do the colors gloat?
They don’t.
Why this fleur-de-cyclone? Why not a harp?
Flowers are not instruments
and will not roar
at your fingers
What is the message of this…this…
Look closer at the cigarette you just stubbed out
here it is again the horizon
an orange milk and an absolutely blue
and dead center,
eating itself.
//
Alexa Doran is a mother, a lyrical gangster, and a PhD student at FSU. She has recently been featured or is forthcoming in CALYX, The Pinch, Gertrude Press, The James Franco Review, Juked and Posit literary magazines. One of her poems about Dada artist Emmy Hennings recently won first place in the Sidney Lanier Poetry competition.