Wren Donovan

Orca, A Literary Journal

Mourning (White)

I feel as if wearing white.
White for mourning, white as ash or bone or cloud or froth on waves far out to sea. White as the opposite
of shadow, white as something lost.

Poetry South

Next Track: Love in Vain

There’s always a train, he used to say.  Always a train, a whistle in darkness, reminder of distances  we’ll never know. Reminder of there not here, you not me...

Emerge Literary Journal

Untitled Poem About Breaking

Once I believed I was finding my toughness learning to trust my own strength, to believe I wouldn’t break. Now I see I’m learning to accept that I am breaking always breaking again and again broken never ending never healed always healing always breaking bleeding on a cycle with the moon which is a rock that cracks ribs and opens sternum until my heart stands out alone anatomically correct like Frida’s heartbreak (she knew she was broken always breaking).

Cumberland River Review

The Only Girl

You could see her if you looked through the window,
long-haired girl on a canopied bed. Pink bedclothes, girlish furniture in white. Small drawers full of talismans and pencils. One hundred strokes at the mirror.

Harpy Hybrid Review

Margin of Error

In D.C. I saw a work of art at least two times removed from its creation: A grainy film on repeat, of a woman digging rock, a self-sized hollow where she rested, fit her body (nude) into the space she’d carved out in the stone. Beside a river. She is no longer living, she died young. Cause of death uncertain but suspicious.

I learned I was a natural at empathy, inspiring trust. I held space well.

The Shore

Orange Often

Orange is often my least favorite color. 
Monarch stripes of the tigers that stalk through my dreams in tall grass. Orange of sunsets, of course, and bright citrus and volunteer lilies that bloom in the ditches in June. I would eat oranges while watching TV, when Mama was out and I was fourteen.

Chaotic Merge

Bees

I used to sit in pools of clover making chains of flowers for my head and neck. The corner yard in Utah pointing back to planes in silhouette across a summer field of sun and weeds. ...

Anti-Heroin Chic

Three Poems

Mama’s underground in red-dirt Mississippi where she’s been these fourteen years. My body ages toward hers
Came from hers. Every seven years, I am new cells new skin a supple snake in jeans and hennaed hair.
Am I of her body still

Emerge Literary Journal

Trivia

Last night you told me trivia in bed. It’s one hundred thousand light years across the Milky Way. Two hundred trillion human years to escape beyond the curved edge of the infinite (apparently the infinite has edges). After failing to imagine the starry swimming pool of god that seems to never end but somehow does, I thought of ever-tinier things, like pebbles and poppy-seeds and rainbow flecks of beach-glass ground to sand, and your breath moving hairs on the back of my neck. Even smaller now, t

Gastropoda

More Like the Bat

Hollow like the leg bone of a bird Fragile like the finger bones of bats Both options offer lightness and allow for flight. No hollow bones for me, only this splintering.

I suppose I am more like the bat

blinking out from overhangs and underpasses,

No bird am I, no spirit of the daylight sky

This burrower falls to flight out of necessity.

Wren Donovan (she/her) lives in Tennessee. Her poetry appears or is upcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Harpy Hybrid Review, The Dil

Farewell Transmission

Untitled Poem About Light

Light takes my hand
and crawls across my brow.
Its absence hollows out
my eyes, blossoms
in my mouth.

Yellow Arrow Journal

Escape Velocity

She knew me well-enough to know that I would lose her. She smiles beside a road somewhere. Polaroid hills are faded grey, her breast is white, her large eyes sharp and dark. She...

Bulb Culture Collective

Paramecium

I do have boundaries. I am enclosed, but porous. Permeable and edged with moving lashes like some alien eye. Ectoplasm, endoplasm, organelles and nuclei, two blind spots. Stellated jelly packet. Vacuoles. I drink up my surroundings, eat by (what is it called) phagocytosis.

Green Ink Poetry

At the New Moon, Near Sunset, Cortez Colorado

Silver-green sage under snow
of white cottonwood fluff.
Greens against red-rock awaiting red sunset.
Bright flower faces turned toward the light

that will leave them, betray them

to stars without moon.
The lady will cover her pale face
in shadow, hiding from me
and the flowers. I wait with them

reddened by sun and surrounded

Emerge Literary Journal

Lacerations

Deep stabs into the heart and lungs along with shallow cuts into the chest. Thin skin and rawhide ribcage.
A weltering of wounds, paper cuts and ice picks. The killer didn’t know what force to use. I trace the lines
connect the dots, tease out the pattern. Tilt my head.
You were abusive. You could not love me. I was not happy.
The simplest explanation is usually what’s true.
A cacophony of nicks from Occam’s Razor.

Tattie Zine

A Valentine For My Mother

On a screen-porch in Baton Rouge, real low to the ground my mother’s hands rattle the old metal peeler birthing naked potatoes pulling down long skinny strips that curl like old paper and stick like wet leaves
and smell just like dirt. We swim in sweaty Lou’siana air and click and clatter of bugs and kids hollering somewhere and faraway lawn mowers. My little brother is there.
We’re carving raw potatoes into art stamps, a vintage project for small hands, excavating
raw white flesh from each newly opened slick face, slippery blinking round and blank.
I sculpt the first letter of my name with the small knife, sneak a piece of crunch into my mouth.
My kindergarten fingers cut around a three-pointed tulip then two-pointed cat head
I attempt a smiling sun with crown of spikes and then a Valentine heart for Mama
who has covered the wooden table in newspaper set out pools of paint in little glass jars

Fahmidan Journal

Cactus

Your body can’t be touched except  by special birds and spiders. Your thirst is quenched by fog because there is no rain for you. You’re stuck in desiccated ground,  all the worst dry...

Hecate Anthology

Red Bleeds To Black

I have no real experience with wolves or wild dogs devouring dead among slender tree trunks in moonlight. I have never actually seen those slinking black forms move against blue snow. Only one wolf once, blue-eyed and familiar, and now this weird half-dream. Thick writhing tails curled like oil tracks in water, they scattered like rats into cracks in the moonlight when I clapped my hands. Leaving the bodies still and charcoal-black against blue snow in moonlight. Why would I have this dream. Because I watched a war movie in black and white. Because those old photographs, bodies dropped or tossed like toys, limbs akimbo asunder in ditches and fields, wool uniforms blackened eyes open or closed demanding dignity denied to them by the lens. We call those photographs old but no photographs are old. Just yesterday I saw a sepia face smiling on a beach, a face soon after famous for hiding and dying and hoping. I turn my body over on the bed.

Emerge Literary Journal

Alien and Roe

Where does this anxious monster live in me, and can it be removed, or is its body wrapped around my heart, tentacled among my lungs, knitted into the network of my nerves and veins. Do we share blood? Am I still

me, or lessened now to carrier,

to hostess, all my insides

albumen and yolk, my outsides

eggshell, leathered and amphibian.

Limbs move beneath my belly, flesh

stretched over fat that glistens

when exposed to light, when the time for

opening comes. Is this anxiou

Emerge Literary Journal

Message From a Muse

Dear girl who wants to write,
What are you willing to sacrifice to learn to break
to fatten to starve, to look at to talk about to live with.
Your pain is big in the dark and small in the light, are you willing to lie
in the crawlspace to bruise purple-black and blue-green to
feed on your own brittle spirit at a formica tabletop
covered with atomic stars covered with orphaned coffee cups
brown stains circling waiting sitting in a kitchen alone but never
alone enough.

Harpy Hybrid Review

(Save Us From) Eternal June

Deadfall chestnuts idiotically signal the arrival, come June, of the messiah. Wood-grainy voices of old acorns and walnuts combine to roar imminent salvation.  Black oak,...

DarkWinter Lit

I'll Try To Explain Why Zombies Make Me Sad

The original Night of the Living Dead, all silver shadowed black and white, would rise up in my hypnagogic sixteen-year-old brain and I would pray to bar it from my dreams. Not because of gore, the guts and greyscale blood. Because the Sadness. Emptiness both more and less than death. The little girl who turned and ate her parents, the man who ate his sister, all the love reduced to vacant. Yes I know it’s funny. I probably shouldn’t have watched it stoned. Later it was Shelter, when the little

Ink Drinkers Poetry

Eclipse

I would love to write at night keep company with the night owls  and the birds that wake in wee hours of the morning. I am not this sunlit zombie.  Fae or witch or boundary-beast, one of...

Last Stanza Poetry Journal

Two Poems

My mother died before she got old. I have all from her that I’ll ever have. Her voice, people tell me, her books,
way too many, the French horn she played late at night.