Kara Dorris: Anaphora of Impossible Desires

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

Anaphora of Impossible Desires

I wanted something simple, I wanted perfection.

I wanted natural

like the body recognizing itself in another

body of water.

I wanted to feel resurrected.

I wanted the past to fulfill its contract, reconcile

with that country song,

the one about good old days & daddies

that never go away. I wanted my father to wander homelessly

in another daughter’s brain.

I wanted to gag want, & I did (for a while).

I wanted to reframe, know a fall from a plane wouldn’t kill

that a wall is really a bridge between. 

I wanted to be the hip replacements

my loved ones needed, cup

his joint in my palm’s shadow, its twin cushion

cradling hers, three gaits synced in empathy.

I wanted to vaporize the spit of angry words in Texas heat.

I wanted us to heal without feeling another’s pain.

I wanted us to feel each other’s pain so we could heal.

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Kara Dorris is the author of Have Ruin, Will Travel (Finishing Line Press, 2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (forthcoming, 2020). She has also published five chapbooks: Elective Affinities (dancing girl press, 2011), Night Ride Home (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Sonnets from Vada’s Beauty Parlor & Chainsaw Repair (dancing girl press, 2018), Untitled Film Still Museum (CW Books, 2019), and Carnival Bound [or please unwrap me] co-written with Gwendolyn Paradice (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2020). Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, I-70 Review, Rising Phoenix, Harpur Palate, Cutbank, Hayden Ferry Review, Tinderbox, Puerto del Sol, The Tulane Review, and Crazyhorse, among others literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011). Her prose has appeared in Wordgathering, Breath and Shadow, Waxwing, and the anthology The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked (Cinco Puntos Press, 2016). Currently, she is a visiting assistant professor of English at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.