"Divorce" tries to make sense of dread, of the unmoored life. It stems from an urge to recognize even the most transitory breeze as a home. The lines move back and forth like a steel ball through a pinball machine, always trying to land somewhere. In the poem, my son and I think God is big...maybe even big enough to hold the fear we keep tossing like hot coals from hand to hand. It's God's bigness which makes me think about how humans can't comprehend large numbers; 46 billion and 1 trillion have almost exactly the same bearing on the mind, the numbers are just too high for us to be able to make meaningful distinctions. God is like this too, so my hope is the poem urges readers to ask 'where do God and numbers meet' and 'what about this connection could be a source salvation'?

Alexa Doran completed her PhD in Poetry at Florida State University in 2021 and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Tallahassee Community College. Her full-length collection DM Me, Mother Darling won the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was published in April 2021 (Bauhan). She is also the author of the chapbook Nightsink, Faucet Me a Lullaby (Bottlecap Press 2019). You can look for work from Doran in recent or upcoming issues of Pleiades, Witness, Massachusetts Review, and NELLE, among others.

W: alexadoran.com
X: @realLEXCalibur