Alexander Duringer

Buffalo’s Rising A

To say my name means to hackle
your nose & make breath slant

into an Eh rather than Ah. Certainly
never Aw. Few bits of wonder after 

dead factory floors, just rust & rats
awake with bars till 4am where Labatts

(Canadian, ah well, two bucks) crack
glass necks & spill down traps 

eager to avoid their own disgraces
at home with their collections of shale 

or quartz, relics that worms laced 
bodies under–slick slips of Atlas

below earth red-bit with syrup maples.
The kids’ bookbags are full of apples 

& essays & mace & I, too, went to speech 
therapy–was made to strategize through a maze 

with no lamp, calling the second half of Hephaestion’s 
name with a tongue speared to the snake’s 

S, that queer brace, but never cased the jagged 
A whose tram we still ride without blame.

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Alexander Duringer is from Buffalo, NY and earned his MFA from North Carolina State University. He is a winner of the American Academy of Poets Prize as well as the Bruce & Marjorie Petesch Award. In 2022 he was a finalist for The Sewanee Review’s annual poetry contest. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Cola Literary Review, The Seventh Wave, Plainsongs and Poets.org.