Dear Casey Kasem. You always tap out at forty

so I know you respect a boundary. Long before Not Me Not Now. made victim blaming public policy. you understood women. deserved to owl. out their destinies. Sometimes I pull you up. on Youtube just to hear you. laugh with a caller. the jibber jabber of static surrounding you like an altar. I sigh as you syrup through. a letter from Jenny the New Yorker. dedicating a ditty to her long-lost neighbor. the one who tended the rhododendrons. playing Highway to Heaven. DJ Kasem I never wanted your attention. will survive without your blessing. but I stand by my wonder. who would you have been as my lover. wild against the tomatoes each spring. would you have held a vine to the twilight so I could see. the Little Dipper in miniature. or would the comet purr of the universe. shrug behind the hail. hammered in our berth.
S. Erin Batiste
Alexa Doran’s full-length collection, DM Me, Mother Darling, won the 2020 May Sarton Poetry Prize and was published by Bauhan Publishing in April 2021. 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 Literary Mama, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Thrush, Hobart, and Salt Hill Journal, among others. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website. 
Art: New Beginning #133, Encaustic on Wood Panel, 2021 by Chizu Omori.