Strength

When I buy seed pods, I choose by name
not looks or season. I don’t care how a succulent

shows off her curves or dives into a reservoir
of cliffs. I never knew the variations

of aloe: hedgehog, tiger tooth, candelabra,
& soap: all things that scratch & burn

& yet treatments for injuries.
I stuck my hand into a furnace’s mouth once.

I thought it was an industrial tiger. I thought
it was a learning experience. I was willing to take

my ruler slaps, my switch hits, just to have
that feeling committed to memory. Instinct

to avoid danger isn’t enough. I needed real
world, hands-on experience. Water doesn’t give

when you jump from a cliff. Water breaks bones.
I needed to know this. So I jumped. I have a reservoir

of muscle memories like this. My mirror
neurons have been in training since I was six

& realized people rarely said what they meant.
I used to suck purple kool-aid frozen in ice trays.

I let the cube rest on my tongue until
it stitched itself into my being & only warm faucet

water could save me. See, water kills & it saves.
Fire too. I held my hand in that furnace

to see what choice fire would choose.
When I jumped off that cliff

I spoke to water, not some god. Asked the waves
to let me be kindred for a while.

To let me wash up on some shore where families
picnic, where mothers & grandmothers

& daughters don’t fear their destinies
to become each other. Did you know The Fool

is the most powerful card in the Tarot deck?
Not the Lovers, not the Wheel of Fortune.

Not even Strength, which is my favorite, how
she walks side by side with a tiger

without fear or danger. The tiger eats her, of course.
But until that bite, she is unafraid & sticks

her hand in every furnace she encounters.
She smears her wounds with the stickiest, prickliest

aloe she can find. It’s this way she learns
that some things can hurt & soothe

simultaneously. It is succulent, this relieved pain.
It is many-named: unrequited, dual-

edged, the future tense. It is the seed pods we sow
into the ground with each step away,

because we can’t escape it. The pain. The relief.
The belief that we must suffer to know why

every furnace is worth the loss of a finger
or two, every cliff, worth

the ten seconds of fear
before the percussive splash.

*

Kara Dorris is the author of three poetry collections: HitBox (Kelsay Books 2024), Have Ruin, Will Travel (2019) and When the Body is a Guardrail (2020) from Finishing Line Press. She has also published five chapbooks. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Redivider, Nine Mile, DIAGRAM, Wordgathering, Puerto del Sol, and swamp pink, among other literary journals, as well as the anthology Beauty is a Verb (2011). Recently, she edited the poetry anthology Writing the Self-Elegy: the Past is Not Disappearing Ink (SIU Press, 2023). She currently teaches writing at Illinois College. For more information, please visit karadorris.com.