What Replaces Us When We Go

Doxsee (The Next Monsters) muses on the weight of time, unsolved mysteries, and the human ability to casually harbor great pain. Cultivating a sense of morbid enlightenment, Doxsee requires her readers to employ some mental gymnastics to navigate her otherworldly landscape of surreal and bewildering vignettes. She has a gift for crafting visceral, sonically alluring images that are pliable yet precisely structured: “My face so haloed by charred/ orphans you have never// seen. When we arrest our/ mouths, instant half-hearts// fizzle from each eye. I take/ a picture of you with my// throat & years hatch a version/ never touched by light// that will make it real.” Occasionally these visions overflow the senses and feel impenetrable, as when she writes, “Somewhere someone gives a haircut to a baby goat and spells ME in the desert with what’s shorn off. The letters are the size of lungs. Another person lights a fire nearby and the rest of the world is a planetarium families of rabbits jump up and down within.” Doxsee’s most admirable moments are lithe and sardonic: “I know a vacation spot for when/ your hand clenches shut &// we morph into orbs, finished.” This is an enigmatic but perceptive inventory of emotions that emerge in the liminal land visited in waking dreams. (Dec.)