A Poem by Ed Doerr

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Organizing My Underwear Drawer By Silhouette, Color, & Designer As A

Coping Mechanism At the Onset of a Panic Attack

Don’t die in a pair of dirty draws, my uncle once said.

You don’t want nobody snickering at two slugs

racing down the crack of your ass.

The mystery of the universe within bleary-eyed reach:

sometimes, so soft you forget. You’ve long

since sewed its truth into your seams;

other times, a waistband snapped against tender skin.

Trust me, his eyes begged, like he’s seen the best minds

of his generation with their shit-stained

tighty-whities looped around their ankles,

bloated & festering in rain-choked sewers,

like a pair of black Calvin Klein Intense Power briefs

can kill the bass & turn up the lights

on the euphoric cancer-cell rager

thumping in the depths of my colon,

can disperse the blood-shot hordes

& finally lock the fuck up for the night,

or red Under Armor Boxerjocks

can transmute into a stop sign

& spit a whistle’s shriek

to halt a bus from mashing me to a pulp

a pedestrian would almost certainly

dismiss as a glop of wet tar,

or yellow Diesel stretch briefs

can shunt hydrogen into the core of the sun

before its final gasp & collapse

swallow existence in its gaping maw,

our atomic unmaking reduced to flecks of shit

on the draws of an unstitched universe.

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Ed is a teacher and the author of Sautéing Spinach With My Aunt (Desert Willow Press, 2018). He was recently selected as a featured poet for Cathexis Northwest Press. Other words can be found in or forthcoming from Water/Stone Review, Hippocampus Magazine, One Teen Story, Perhappened, Parentheses Journal, Drunk Monkeys, Flypaper Lit & more. Readers can follow him on Twitter (@EdDoerrWrites) and visit his website (eddoerr.com).