Alexa Doran
2025 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize Runner Up
—
M. Scott Peck Wants Me to Teach My Son How to Suffer
I.
At the Syracuse airport, trying to make the sky math snow, my son and I pray for accretion.
Let me get some of that Bob-the-Builder Snow.
That Mama Say You Thicc Snow.
God is at Home Depot. God fucks with sawdust. God fucks with sawdust the way we fuck with Syracuse snow.
Obviously, I’m not Madonna, and there is no chunky sheet of pearls to pant across my chest, but I know glamour is a pattern.
And it’s still Paris in my heart when my son turns toward the starlight gash that patterns every night and hopes snow will lapse from its grasp.
II.
M. Scott Peck thinks we can turn discipline into less suffering.
Home Depot thinks God should leave the sawdust alone. Thinks God should learn his exits.
On the edge of a graveyard minked in night, cement Jesus moonbathes.
When M. Scott Peck says discipline, he means the absence of snow.
God is always fucking with absence. God thinks Jesus looks good as cement. Better as pattern. Better as bird-shat-stone-mold than as snow.
I think we all need something more from the sky than we are getting.
III.
God is in the aisle with all the lamps. With all the 19.99 lights. This isn’t what He came for. But Everyone likes a second to December beneath a wattage slope.
My son wants to leave. Wants to be anywhere the planes aren’t landing. Wants to be where the only thing falling can be tasted, can be slow.
M. Scott Peck should go fuck himself. M. Scott Peck should use the sawdust God left behind to lubricate his stroke.
Snowless Syracuse frozen to our eyelids, my son and I agree to be carpenters.
Better to build than to hope.
Alexa Doran is the author of Exit Interview, forthcoming in 2026 from Galileo Press, as well as of the award-winning collection DM Me, Mother Darling (Bauhan 2021), and of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). She currently works as an Assistant Professor English at Tallahassee State College and reads fiction and creative non-fiction for CRAFT and Master’s Review. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website at alexadoran.com
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