Winner of the 2016 Driftless Prize in Poetry Learn more >
Lindsey D. Alexander: Sleepless in Indiana, I Contemplate the Age-Old Arts
Dog that won’t stop barking and all I can think: I don’t know anything about stars— not what they’re called or how they form, but how we turn stars into stickers to surprise our children and assure them You are better than normal children. On boat decks, sailors cry out Orion! and they see a man, but they’ve only drawn stick-figure self-portraits of fire and longing. I tried to sketch my face one night with stronger browlines, higher cheekbones, but it was all nose, scaly water moccasin: a viper me. I paid someone who drew me in red with big hair, gaunter— the way he drew me made me see how lonely he thought I was. I rolled that portrait with wax paper and a rubber band, look at it during the Lenten season— That same spring or summer on the back of a boat, I caught a sunfish, baited him with gum. I didn’t like unhooking him— tore his lip. Astrologists shape stars into fish, take cracks at decoding futures. Palm-reading hocus-pocus: on my hand—which is starboard, port, and which is solar flare? I could use that hand to throw a tomahawk from this bed and hit neither boat nor star from way down here, so far from water.
LINDSEY D.
ALEXANDER’s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Third Coast,
Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, DIAGRAM, Fifth
Wednesday Journal, and cream city review, among other journals, as well as
the anthology New Poetry from the Midwest. In 2014, she was a scholar at the
month-long NEH Institute “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor.” More from this
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