David A. Porter | Annis Domini | Poets Resist

David A. Porter is a graduate of Rutgers University and San Francisco State University, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing. Porter was a co-founder and the managing editor of 20 Pounds of Headlights, a literary annual published in San Francisco in 2004. He has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry in Alexandria Quarterly (Semi-Finalist, End of Summer Poem Contest), Cold Mountain Review, Ghost Ocean, Hotel Amerika, Nimrod, Orange Coast Review, The Santa Clara Review, Sojourn, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sunbeams (The 2018 Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Contest Anthology), The Surfer’s Journal, W42st and you are here, and he is the Editor at Large for Stereo Embers Magazine. Porter lives in New York, where he is working on a collection of short stories, Protracted Adolescence, a collection of poems, Ghost Season, and a non-fiction book about music, 20,000 Things I Love.

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Also by David A. Porter: Horafi

Poets Resist
Edited by Michael Carter
August 14, 2019

David A. Porter

Annis Domini

We expect too much of him. He is a frenzied parent, hard-pressed to push a vacuum across the living room before company arrives. He dehydrates, suffers migraines, always feels drawn-and-quartered by the day. My grandmother would have said, “his eyes are bigger than his stomach.” He knows the nudge he gives your son back toward the sidewalk from 94th, at Columbus, means the shell an Israeli tank fires into the Buffer Zone will kill another man’s child. We whisper, “inshallah,” cross ourselves, but his anguish is unyielding. In the middle of a burning night in Nicosia, he uncoils the umbilical cord from the throat of an infant boy; not far away, to the west, another boy, harnessed to a pair of melted wings, falls to the sea.