by Donna Vorreyer

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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In the kitchen, I refine the alchemy
of avocados, salt and stir them into guacamole,
this conversion a delicious and knowable magic.

Other tricks are difficult to master—
cards that repair themselves when torn in two,
an assistant who disappears into empty space.

I prefer spells within reach—lying prone
as a masseuse resets my muscles and meridians
or sitting on a weathered chair as vapor rises

from the lawn, a spider descending
from a branch to thread a new web.
Some nights, it is as simple as static

on the radio, the hiss of disconnection
and departure, or a kiss hello after a day apart.
This is the kind of magic I know best, accepting

love, returning it. It is this string of years,
this bowl of avocados, mashed with lime
and garlic, just the way you like it.

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She lives in the Chicago suburbs where she hosts the monthly online reading series, A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.

by Donna Vorreyer

I think of her as I wander from room to room in
my blue bathrobe, this anchoress who was always
alone. Now that I am home, her story lingers, one
I recited as I ushered visitors through her reproduced
cell. She survived the Black Death, its scourge and
stench, bore more than enough weight for one life.
I would think she would desire only sweetness—
green fields starred with thistle, spheres of milkweed
luring butterflies. Instead she chose a cell with no exit,
silence and stone. Three windows for her triune God.

At least she chose it.

Here at home, the weight of my own solitude spreads
like a yellow bruise. I haven’t showered for days, but
since she rarely bathed at all, I’m good. Authentic.
She penned pious revelations about the Lord while I
scribble lists and binge The Young Pope. Close enough.
I know she was revered as holy, as close to God as one
could get, but surely she missed the heat of touch, the lock
of fingers intertwined, the key of them unwinding. Surely
she wept each time the priest intoned Hoc est corpus
meum pro vobis—this is my body, given for you.

A body without touch cannot be certain it exists.

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016), and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Her work has appeared in Rhino, Tinderbox Poetry, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, and other journals, and she serves as an associate editor for Rhino Poetry. Recently retired from 36 years in public education, she can’t wait to see what happens next.

by Donna Vorreyer

One says that his skin glows,
another that he looks peaceful.
Amber-hued yet desiccated, he seems to me
indifferent, the world now the least
of his miseries, his narrative resolved.
He lies surrounded by scarabs, their brilliance
auspicious, more to my liking,
the way their jeweled green and lapis backs
hint at reed and river, the earth that tethered
him, the sky that his gods occupied.
It is no phenomenon, to ritualize death,
the wake for my own father just weeks ago
a somber sort of party, adorned
with photographs and flowers until grief
stomped in like a wayward moose,
terrifying in its stature, but wielding
great tenderness in its enormous eyes.
We move on to the dinosaur remains,
the reconstructed bones majestic, scaffolded
with bolt and steel. We learn to tell carnivore
from herbivore by the teeth,
which bones lingered in pits of tar, how
the creatures thrived, connected to their ecosystems,
could not abide change. One student asks

the docent about the size of their hearts,
and I don’t hear the answer as my own
beats loud and primordial, despite being
petrified lately, my body performing
in hypothalamic motion, first to care for then to bury
both parents within five months, their lives
too entwined to survive one without
the other. There was a holiness to their faces
in their last days, gaunt and drawn yet knowing,
much like the mummy. I wander back to study his face.
Peaceful is right, I decide—the deliberate fold
of his hands across his chest, the scarabs
shimmering, singing remembered, remembered.

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Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), both from Sundress Publications. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Rhino, Tinderbox Poetry, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, and many other journals. Her third full-length collection is forthcoming in 2020 from Sundress.