Kara Dorris
GUEST ROOM AS WILDERNESS
For the day you need cute otter pictures to survive, light your favorite candles. Remember Bath & Body Works when you & your lover sniffed every soap until you couldn’t sniff anymore, & so made up your own flavors. Picture what cute otters smell like: lake & moss & dead fish & innocence. Remember how you took turns trying on lotions & then licking each other’s hands. That was the moment that you learned senses lie… later your lover says you owe him a blowjob because it’s been a while. The world is what you imagine, & you take the belief that everyone is owed something by someone else as evidence. Debt turns into bells, & as you walk into a classroom or grocery store or drive a highway you hear chiming. When Alice falls down the rabbit hole you realize she falls into The Murder Cabin, a collective unconscious archive—boys who touched while we slept, who tried to push past our doors, every babe, gimp, honey, little girl, bitch. Like bombs underneath the floorboard of our skin. This is when you search for cute otter pictures. The one where they hold hands. The one that mimics that Beauty & the Beast scene, all the birds landing on the otter’s head & feet as if he is a floating raft. As if the body is the only safe place to land. You see an otter napping on a husky & you think, yes, yes, yes. You want someone to lean against you that same way & say: I otterly adore you. Isn’t that what we all want?
Maybe otters know
happiness. Maybe they don’t need to
know that they know
*
you you
you
you
fall
into
babe, gimp, honey, little girl, bitch
floorboard of our skin
floating raft s