kara dorris
Autopsy as Wilderness
I want to see body steam puncture frigid air. Steam is just sweat that meets its fate, tears in a natural state. To forget, we rely on blood & guts & our ability to sleep as still as film extras, dead hookers on CSI. Except I don’t believe in death or hookers (& prefer the term sex worker) even as our skin turns blue in tv light (after all, we live on—here, there—& we sell ourselves). Veins as story-ridden rivers, skin an early warning defense—goosebumps, hairs-on-end. Between body & world breathe fear & failure & poet; yet I forget how to spell vulnerability even as I practice cutting shame’s dotted line, pry open a chest,
spread ribs until moisture
spills from one heart’s rag & bone
silo to another’s
*
Intimacy
Mirrored windows line a hotel hallway, one opens
to a husband & wife sleeping in
separate beds. Beyond, a house so white
it seems primed to reflect
distance & memories. The trim
is a seafoam the woman names spring.
We are not a house of mermaids, she says, but I
disagree. We have ruined ourselves—tithed & swept
away—for the men in our lives, button
by thread. My mother’s sex talk was don’t so when
a boy slipped hands beneath my shorts I gasped like
a fish hooked. I fell for the same old lure, neck tight & breath
hushed as the last girl, & yes, constant erosion
as the almost man next whose fingers
made me come so hard light
speared, my back spasmed with electricity
& in Mexico, that romantic magical night when
the one who received my virginity
accused me of lying because I didn’t bleed like a kite
red against sky as he thrust into my depths
because he didn’t break into something unopened
& I remember his disbelief when I said horseback riding
can break a girl’s hymen. But I digress.
My point is like disinfectant
before a cut, like choking
down tequila shots & then kissing
the toilet, like sex on the beach until sand grinds
into so-called unmentionable places, intimacy can be pleasant,
like a memory foam mattress,
until it isn’t.
Bildungsroman as Wilderness
I remember you. I drove home from college one night, your voice in my ear saying I’d be alright. Your politician moves went unnoticed, slipping into distantly supportive since your latest booty call still warmed you. I could lay & watch a dung beetle slow crawl across the floor with you all night, fantasizing about the position of your hand in relation to mine. Your touch felt nuclear. You blew up your life for your best friend’s sister. We lasted a year unforgiven, want as exoskeleton. I thought I was an oceanographer of people, as if I could sense waves of wanting, the ebb into old habits caught in the flow to make new... trapped between the churned-up & examined past & a future that waits for our work. How could I have known the girl before was pregnant & as big as a pompadour sitting cross-legged in your bed that night. I’ve never been angry about it. We were flushed, only residue. I like to think you were less sleazy & more nervous father-to-be. Unafraid to touch my tumors, I remember you had the most beautiful hands. Not quite manicured & glossed but a long way from being an afterthought.
the orange sunrise of
your hands, I believed in
we offered so little
*
Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: HitBox (Kelsay Books 2024), Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Nine Mile, DIAGRAM, Conduit, Wordgathering, Puerto del Sol, and swamp pink, among other literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She currently teaches writing at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.