"In The Encyclopedia of Human Gestures" by Donna Vorreyer

 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.

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​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?