Outside of You By Kika Dorsey

The Rising Phoenix Review

Dec 26

Outside of You

You have installed the salvage-yard door, its oak sanded
and stained beneath your hands like a preened wing.

I never meant to leave, nevertheless lock you in, but here I am
in the middle of the Colorado plains, drinking the sun, grass

and yucca and crown vetch at my feet, a smidgeon of a dream
where I stepped between a glass house and a lake, and I chose

the water. I turned to it and entered, hips rotating with my stroke,
those very hips you set into stone, you planted as the bed of a garden

full of kale and tomatoes to feed us and two-by-fours boxing it in.
You see, the rusted steel of the front-end loader is our color,

tawny and amber, and it stands ready to clean out the ditch
before opening it like these May daffodils. You see, I ask you

to not tell me you're enough because you aren't. I know
good and well I'm not enough. We can stand in the still

center of what may be a storm; we can find an inner peace
and surely the gods would comply, the ghosts of our mothers

sigh with relief, but to strive and be more is the handful of mud,
its minerals, on the bottom of the lake, which I smear on my face

before the emptiness, before the wind. Only my eyes are naked,
roving where the coyotes hunt, where the hawks build their nests

on cottonwood trees alongside the ditch on the plains that envelope me.
I am grateful for sight, for doors, for thresholds where I can meet

myself again and again, where rust becomes ink on my lips,
where what was used becomes new, as we ourselves do every day,

and the metal beams, glistening silver, support the walls of the glass house
we will enter so instead of each other, we look outside.

By Kika Dorsey

Biography:

Kika Dorsey is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature and her books include the chapbook Beside Herself and three full-length collections: Rust, Coming Up for Air, and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger, which won the Colorado Authors' League Award for best poetry collection. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times. Currently, she is a lecturer at the University of Colorado in literature and creative writing. Her novel, As Joan Approaches Infinity, was published by Gesture Press in 2023. In addition, she works as a writing coach and ghostwriter. In her free time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado's mountains and plains.