Let the Bodies Hit the Floor: A Cycle
Alexa Doran
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If you attended the funeral for my Trapper Keeper’s iron-on patch, Frank the Frog, in my fifth grade homebase, or watched me lug a dog dish over to my golden retriever Lisa Frank folder, you are likely unconvinced by the current scene:
Yorkie resting beneath my knees, a few unread emails on the screen, an ode to American normalcy.
*
My seven-year-old son has grown fear like I once grew fake animals.
My Imaginary Menagerie: Yellow Bunny. Puffalumps. TLC Bear. Gaylord. Bumpkins.
I once listed the names of all these stuffies to a male poet who shrugged. I just added -y to anything they gave me. I thought it was funny, this lack of imagination, of wanting to honor something.
*
I hate when guys ask any tattoos which would be so cool if they were interested in the way a woman calligraphies her worldview, but is actually about revealing something, about thrusting some out- of-sight body part into conversation and therefore into view. No hidden moons or lovers’ names for my skirts to skew.
I can’t find anything my body can commit to.
*
My son and I take all the pop culture quizzes in the kids’ magazines. What’s your favorite color, Mommy? Green! Oh, then you are Luigi. The helper, not the leader. I cite my research. Personality tests are biased, reductive, harmful. My audience barely nods. Goldfish and Gatorade sloshing past his lips, he looks for another question which will weave a cartoon I’ve never seen and me irrevocably in his memory.
*
My classmates could have handled it. The roster of dream animals I needed to exist among our snow-fucked city. After all, they ate the stale brownies and slurped the Capri Suns I brought to celebrate the peeling of Frank from my Trapper Keeper, so maybe they could have nurtured these maternal fantasies, even saw themselves in something besides the TV reflection for a second, but I could not limit my love to what was already fuzzy and cute, I had to play God too.
*
I blame my mom for a lot and that’s mostly because she did nothing between 1994 and 2004 that could count as parenting. A lot fell through that crack. Her excuse was that I was not capable of being parented. Surely, absolutely, supercalifragilistically, I would fuck it up. Laundry. Doing the dishes. Cooking. All those things which might make one sufficient or attractive to a life partner were off-limits.
*
Yes, I had a GiGapet. My grandmother got it for me out of pity. My mother used my boredom with its monotone beeps to further her theory that I was incapable of caring for anything.
*
Yes, I had Littlest Pet Shop. And oh. the almost sugary smell of the plastic, the overly cute renditions of every species. It was capitalist heaven for a wannabe-dog-mom currently forced to walk her Styrofoam lizard down the sidewalk.
But Emily Johnson had the whole damn shop, y’all. Damn those petit-four pink corridors, those pinch- sized pets protected by their stick-on windows and dogfood banquettes. I could only supplement. I, and here let us gather for the sheer weight of my pride, had a Littlest Pet Shop Ice Rink. Penguins, polar bears, and glitter. God had my recipe (or Mattel did extensive studies).
*
Animals who died under my care:
Vanilla, the Guinea Pig
Sweetheart and Frank, the Goldfish
Robinson Crusoe, the Newt
*
My mother is the ideal consumer. Her life is as embedded in commercial comfort as a twig tucked in the tease of its nest. Her existence would fail to mean anything if not welded to the value imposed on it by capitalism. Dedicated to couponing with the same passion as a nun who has forsaken love and touch for Jesus, my mother forced me to earn all my allowance cutting and filing coupons. Health and Beauty. Dairy. Misc. The woeful inadequacy of the coupon cabinet my mother once got as a gift.
*
My goldfish died glamorously. Blue light and blue rocks and the bubble simmer of home. Should beauty be part of death? Vanilla and Robinson were more gothic in their departures. Vanilla died in a pile of vomit and lettuce. Robinson separated into several pieces while my family was on a vacation in Akron, Ohio.
*
My 7-year- old son is suicidal. His first-grade teacher made him a Battle Max Mercutio phonebooth: a plastic version of a rotary phone laminated with a picture of our Yorkie in the rear end of her classroom. Now he calls our dog when he needs peace. or home.
*
Richard Dawkins called my mother a moron. Not her, personally. Unfortunately. But in The God Principle he saves a special flavor of sneer for the folks who treat belief as a transaction. My mother’s reason for believing in God came down to why not. No conviction, no tirade in the name of Jesus, no verses to dribble down the court, nothing earnest or vested with dream, just her perched on the snow-bud sutured sofa, telling me “There is no downside to believing in God. That’s how you get into Heaven. If there is no Heaven, nothing has been lessened.”
*
My son has another dog, a chihuahua mix called Kiki. I named her, but I am no longer her mother. I named her after Judy. Not enough room in me to talk about Judy.
*
The naming of the not-self is an ecstasy.
*
Movies I refuse to watch because they fucking break me:
Fox and the Hou
Milo and Otis
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey
All Dogs Go to Heaven
The Secret of Nimh (seriously, what the fuck)
*
Like my mother, there is a level of delusion I am willing to maintain to avoid pain. Silence the call, storm out the sounds with five counts, phase out the day in a blaze of champagne.
*
Battle Max Mercutio is a hand-me-down from my ex’s mother. She wanted a Yorkie, paid good money for a Yorkie, then “discovered” Yorkies have too much energy. The woman wanted a lump. A furry one, but a lump. I wanted a family. So. Battle Max Mercutio (nee Max) sits swaddled in Shakespearean descendancy, baby-blue bow-tied on the raft of my lap, the perfect and only reason for once letting my ex anywhere near this ass.
*
My brother’s favorite pastime once consisted of 8-am-body- slams on me and whatever unwilling friend were asleep. Drowning Pool’s bass-driven “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” was his theme and I think often of its implications. of mass shootings. of how we allow brutal, inexplicable violence to shape everything. our choice of grocery store. our public education. our sunset. our children.
Opening lyrics to the “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”:
Let the bodies hit the floor!
Let the bodies hit the floor!
Let the bodies hit the floor!
Let the bodies hit the…FLOOR!
*
When did you give up being obscene? Reader, you were obscene.
*
My son was attacked, eye socket shredded, by an abused greyhound when he was four. Ruby was her name.
Everyone blamed my son. Everyone blamed my son but me.
*
Judy’s body hit the floor. And it was my fault.
*
I don’t want to die but I owe a lot to Zoe at the suicide hotline. I used to think. I still think that after Plath, that oven, those nearby children, any suicide is just plagiarized. I want death, at least, to be authentic.
*
I’m so lucky that Judy is the only being I’ve ever loved who left this world as a whisper. I want to feel lucky. But I saw the inner color of Judy’s body. It wasn’t color. God, it wasn’t a color. It was what color keeps from ever being seen.
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Dedication
“Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” is dedicated to the one whom I failed completely, Judy.
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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. For a full list of her publications, awards, and interviews please visit her website.
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Posted in Boudin April '24 Pet and tagged in #boudin, #fiction