![]() 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, reviews, and essays have appeared in Rhino, Tinderbox Poetry, Poet Lore, Sugar House Review, Waxwing, Whale Road Review, and many other journals. Her third full-length collection is forthcoming from Sundress in 2020. In The Encyclopedia of Human Gestures
Kneeling again at the altar of my dog’s shit, a genuflection of civic duty, the park equipped with plastic bags to ensure my reverence, I am struck by this position, for what better evidence of the divine than the workings of the body, all its wastes and its contortions, the joint’s ball and socket rolling with the bend, the foot’s tension arching to balance on the toes, the orchestration of the hands that comb the grass to scoop the mess, the same hands that will later survey this aging flesh, the same hands that will run soft across the lush landscape of your body, the one I know by touch and scent, animal in my devotion, as we both falter toward our demise, into days that host obstacles our younger selves would dismiss, lowering instead into a different type of worship, one that requires no words, and isn’t this also something holy, both of us bending to curve into the other’s failings, blending all the broken parts together in a silhouette that resembles prayer?
1 Comment
Frank De Canio
2/12/2021 02:25:59 pm
Dog crap before civic duty and a wonderfully civil poem with strong images to the end using kneeling with religious implications and as a connective device, Very well done.
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