Alexis Pope

3 Poems

Do I Move You

Your virginity can grow back

A loose fact

Floats from the screen to the girls

Watching this holy regeneration

Sluts,

This is our chance for redemption

Our casual erasure

I contemplate this theory

What grows back really

As if it’s the fleshy parts

That memorize the harm

The qualities they loved

To begin with

Used against me

Like flighty or confused

An indecisive impulsivity

My abandon

When used for myself

Is not what they wanted

To begin with

A story not involving them

As the central character

It’s hard to tell a man

They don’t matter

It’s hard to grow back

A protective surface

Once is tough enough

A race to the loss

A getting it over

My virginity

Was never concrete

My virginity was apparently taken

In this theatrical performance

Objects in a room

Pushed into a pool and taken

Thrown onto a bed and taken

Pitched onto a sink and taken

Rolled out of a car and left

What then grows back

What then was lost

What then do they carry

In their wagon behind

Where does the virginity go

After the removal of

And then each time after

What of that

Sluts,

Our battle cries to inattentive ears

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Get Debt Relief Now

Lavender    on my still desk

fragrance becomes it

Lovely in its afternoon death  A prescription

becomes wordy in its purposed symptoms

Money sent out in this and that direction

What feels purposeful in this

Is the total abandonment of reason

I’ve come home to plasticized dusk

Recognition on her face in the morning

that it has become both too hot

Under the blankets and too cold

in the room

Please know this

my love for you is not a complaint

Although I have many

what happens on a Monday afternoon

Does not interest me as much

as your relaxed face leaned back

On my pillow

expressing your interest in the comforts

Of my bed

when we invoke particulars

I’m not so much invested

as applied

So then I get to work

and we are all singing a Taco Bar idea

And I’m thinking taco

as slang for vagina

But feel it is too early for this

as public announcement

I reach out to brush your morning skin

and it’s been not long

Since you were not here

but I was talking about the lavender

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And how even its endings

Smell sweet

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Mercury is in Retrograde & I’m on My Period

A red viola once played in the city before me

Alarm buzzes to wake you in the next room

I sit with it

Words not yet rolling from my mouth

I’ll put those elsewhere

Not a poem for you but of you

Listening to my mother talk I’m sure

I want to be coming when I’m almost 70

Which couldn’t happen before this

I’m sick about it

On the drive home from Indiana

When I was afraid of drifting behind the wheel

I was also being chased

By the ones before

All of them the numbers I can’t count

And don’t care to

I will whistle my pillow silent

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Alexis Pope

2-3 stunning books that I've read this year:

Here are a few of the books I've read this year:

• Are You My Mother, Alison Bechdel

• Nobody is Ever Missing, Catherine Lacey

• The Mothers, Brit Bennett

• Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng

Best movie starring Chevy Chase?

My first answer was The Great Outdoors. Chevy Chase is not in that.

But seriously, this.

What author or book do you feel like you “should have” read, but haven’t yet, or probably never will?

Proust.

What is the creepiest thing about outer space?

That it's there + what it is/means. It's like the ocean. Except I'd be more willing to explore the ocean. Maybe.