Donna Vorreyer
Poetry
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.
Ash Wednesday
I exit a marked being, trying
to beat back my animal
with ceremony, to learn
the oblivion of belief.
This mark says I am no
slave to the snake though
I still ache to touch its tail.
Each new century demands
a resurrection. Ashes to ashes.
Dust to whatever the heart is:
a clock ticking its way toward
some inevitable end. A torch
that has only learned to burn
what it loves.
“ This poem started as a note I made one Ash Wednesday that simply was the phrase ‘marked being.’ As I wrote into the phrase, it became a little meditation for me on the contradiction between desire and denial, between the obsession with erasing one through the other, which isn't really possible. ”
Listen: