Birds & Bees
While driving
in our cherry red
1991 Toyota Celica
convertible, top down,
the road dust & Marlboro
smoke swirling in the hollers
as we race past, Pa notices
I’ve reached puberty, says,
I’ll only tell you this once:
marry rich; marry old; do your best
to get pregnant, then divorce him
so you can take all his money
like your Ma did me. Don’t
sign a pre-nup, &
whatever you do, don’t
be one of those Welfare Queens
buzzing around the benefits
office like your mother, hand
out at the church food bank,
the toy drive, scamming kids
out of their Christmas presents.
If you insist on college, I won’t
stop you, but take it from me—
you won’t learn anything there
that you can’t learn here.
Your mother, she was gonna be
a key punch operator before
that went the way of the dodo—
took the classes and everything
over at Scott Community—
and me, well, I was gonna be
a writer and an electrician, but kids—
you know how it gets with kids.
I’m just saying,
as a man
and as your dad,
being too pretty
is just as bad
as being too ugly,
and you’re too much
like your mother
and your sister, God rest her,
and the men out there
are too much like me,
and really, you’re too
easy—
you gotta work
on your boundaries;
don’t be so
open—
so damn Iowa Nice,
or they’ll see you
as open for business,
if you know what I mean.
Are you listening to me,
Rachael—
I mean
Skylar—
God damn it.
Are you listening?
You need to be
writing this down.
It Doesn’t Thrill Me Half as Much
“This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn’t want to be tracked.”
—Fred Astaire
It’s summertime,
so the mayflies have come
in swarms.
There is no clean air left,
this close to the Mississippi,
so you breathe them in
and they nest in you
for three days,
fucking.
Their whole lives
are fucking, then dying,
and so is yours.
Night and day, they dance
the dance their biology choreographed
while Fred Astaire sings of heaven.
Summer has come
like a hot compress
to your forehead;
it seeks to soothe the soreness
all your youthful play has left you.
Look at how we sing
our sorrow songs,
together lost, but armed
with maps
tattooed on us by our mothers
and fathers to guide us
whenever we wander too far
off the road they’ve stitched.
Look at how we never find
our way back home;
how we have no home left.
Shote’s Head [1]
The hunger / raises me up
from the slab /
so I root
hungry for brains—
for cock—
for thought—
what once was
and wasn’t /
for an apple in the teeth / red
delicious / for color
so I uproot / quite tender
the pig must be very fat, nicely cleaned / tied
to a spit and roasted, spinning
round / what a pig!
tied to a tree / used
for target practice / what a woman!
Mince the tongue and chop
the brains small / I follow my nose
to slaughter / Have the heart roasted
to put in the middle / lay the liver all around
and garnish
The Art of Carving
no one wants to be the one to cut it apart:
the rain makes the must mustier,
and I’ve been puppy dog
and baby doll to him too long
they have taken what’s before me:
all those red dresses
my body bright
they have taken what’s before me, and
all I got was Canine Crunchies in my arm
garlic in my heart—
my blood is oil
boiling grapeseed,
rapeseed, canola—
my throat a saxophone,
my heart keyed up—
rest, rinse, repeat:
the must musts on,
and my Muriel bleeds
when you tickle her;
there’s so much of it,
and it’s so, so pretty
so many pretty things:
my father’s thumb
this brailleskin twilight
meat thawing in a sink
they have taken what’s behind me:
my wooden lung
swollen with wet
my barnacle feet
keelhauled clean
here’s looking at you, kid
you dreamed of escape
but you returned
[1] “Shote’s Head” borrows the italicized language primarily from a recipe of the same name found in Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife, the first regional cookbook published in the United States, though some of the language also comes from other helpful advice found in the “To Roast A Pig” section.
Skylar Alexander is the author of Searching for Petco (Forklift Books, 2022; edited by Matt Hart), a poetry collection which Adam Fell called “a mutant blast radius of righteous Midwestern anger and tender observation.” Both a poet and an essayist, Alexander writes about pop culture, chronic illness, violence, travel, and the particularities of growing up as an angry goth in rural Iowa. She received degrees in English and Entrepreneurial Management from the University of Iowa in 2015 and her Master’s in Secondary Education from NYU Steinhardt in 2022. Her writing has appeared in many places, including Cutbank, Beholder, Mantra,Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, and Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety. A book designer and teacher by trade, she lives with her spouse just outside of NYC.
