Poetry – Issue 11 | January 2011
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by Donna Vorreyer
We drive on winding streets, through tiny towns
with names like music: Amfissa, Itea, Galaxidi.
We have already been lost once, so now we plot
each turn with care. Every village looks the same.
Outside the window, the cobbled sidewalks of this
one are shellacked with rain, white wisps of cloud
resting on the distant hills like a bad toupee.
A girl skips around puddles, her focus on her shoes
intent, as if their placement on these stones will turn
the very earth itself. Her feet dip and dive, back,
forward, side to side, their rhythm infectious. I watch,
enamored with her confidence, her unfaltering steps.
Then her hands begin a frantic dance, cross forehead
to heart, shoulder to shoulder, repeating over and over
as she passes the church - but her focus never leaves
her feet, playful cadence of her lower body undeterred
by the faithful mechanics of her arms. The shocks of
the Renault groan on gravel as we pull over, unfold
and study the map. We will get where we are going.
Sweet oranges ripen on roadside branches like small
puckered suns, shining through this gray December.
About the author
Donna Vorreyer has traveled with her family to every continent except Antarctica and boasts an impressive collection of memories, including an excellent scar from a mountain bike crash in the Himalayas. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Cider Press Review, New York Quarterly, qarrtsiluni, and Rhino. Her first chapbook, Womb/Seed/Fruit, debuted from Finishing Line Press in 2010.
Read our current issue, Issue 11 | January 2011:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
