Three Poems
Builded Him An Altar
I arrange trinkets on a foldaway chair
a lock of your hair the handle of a teacup
the nub of a candle from the winter I ate
only mints and stones and mourned our dog
I wade through this strange assemblage
of memories the distant mutterings of you
in half-sleep signals sailing across miles
to echo in the crook of my elbow
A tin horn from Paris a lump of coal from the Christmas
I caught you with another girl No matter now
I twist a leather thong around my wrist
The future hisses like a B-movie monster
but still I plan our kisses ready to muck through
all manner of reptiles I festoon these totems with beads
and blood finger the circuitry of your discarded cell
Your breath a censer swings past my ears
Sounded Forth The Trumpet
You do not answer your phone, so I drive. The air smells of moss and flannel. When I arrive, alarmed by my devotion, you rub your neck. You let me in, and we decide to play checkers, rewind the pace, pad barefoot around the place, sugaring currants for jam, listening to the shred of ’70s guitars. You spill the salt with your Deadhead dance, toss some over your shoulder and swerve and shimmy up behind me like a pale slow curve. I spread my hands, fling seeds to catch in your dirt, but they clatter to the floor. Everything still hurts, and my hands are an empty garden. We spark like wires, the music rattling our bones to sway, our bellies fire, our mouths poppies opening to release the suns tucked inside. We weave garlands, pretend we’re not fucked. This is how we ignore the doubt, hands grasping at oaths we swore years ago now pale-gilled and gasping on the dock. Soon enough, the venom creeps in. This day that lured us toward joy now hooks our sin straight back toward guilt, the light we bask in most days, the ferns drooping in their baskets. We coast apart, turn the music down. The currants burn, the stench sweet and dead, like blood. We never learn.
The Fateful Lightning
The sky thickens with clouds big as
trucks, big as Texas, and tonight
the slow sad whistle of the train
in the distance will be no more than
a murmur in a dead man’s throat.
It begins like the pinging of rain
on tin, like the crackle of a telephone
too long off the hook, a gathering
of voltage tracing its way to our room
until, struck, we tremble as it vibrates
our hands, our thighs, never the same
place twice, too real to be ignored, no
taunting teenage crush, but something
that leaves us tumbled, limb on limb,
blue pulsing through us, pulsing toward
tomorrow where we will seek another
storm, find a kite, a string, a key, anything
to fly ourselves back to this flashing.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently Tinder, Smolder, Bones, and Snow (dancing girl press). She serves as the reviews editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection and teaches middle school in the suburbs of Chicago.