Wren Donovan

Rust + Moth

Accidental Ghosts

Shadows burned on sidewalks. Smell of sweat in chambray. Prints left on a headboard. Less beer in the fridge, no milk, and this dead leaf tracked in.
The cat let out, a whiff of weed
and scent of someone else, once in my bed.
I thought I coined this turn of phrase
for what we leave behind. Choose instead
fluke phantoms, or coincidental wraiths.
Random unplanned apparitions. Humans
in the abstract, mist on film.
Who can tell when ghosts eclipse us,
where our memories cease to take up space.
Begin...

Stone Circle Review

Excavation / Psyche

We choose where to dig
with soft brushes, careful,
string a polygon grid based on rumors.
Smoke-choked and salty, a stalker
in dark rooms, flashlight
over unconscious Eros.
Fluorescent light, stuttering
lays bare the butterfly
buried in bone and debris.
We seek fleshy red-scented certainty,
find only fossils and holes.

Orca, A Literary Journal

Paris or Maybe Hell

Stricken by sadness and the scent of crushed petals on pavement, I wait for some footsteps returning to the once-girl I was and the lover that you might have been.
Silly, I tell myself thinking of outside, of flowers. We lived in a box

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.

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...

Anti-Heroin Chic

Wondering What Dies

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ...

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.

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

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

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

Anti-Heroin Chic

Southern Gothic #1

Searching for flowers in Morton, Mississippi, where my mother was born and now lies between her grandmother Mary Elizabeth and her big sister Babe whose real name was Ruby Odessa. Aunt Babe had the best summer garden, butter beans and tomatoes and sweet corn, greens that she cleaned in the Maytag, even slimy fuzzy okra pods for gumbo. Her husband grabbed my fifteen-year-old breasts and told me The Bible Says Love Everyone. But Aunt Babe never knew that, and neither did Mama. This half-dead little town has no florist or wildflowers so I buy plastic posies at a dingy Five and Dime.

Thin Veil Press

Butcherbirds

I will go beyond reason
past the quiet gate, well-oiled.
It allows an opening, access
through twin tracks of barbed wire, rusty
with dried blood and insects speared by birds and then forgotten.

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...

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.

Anti-Heroin Chic

Things That Will Remain Unsaid

The day you told us you were leaving we lined up on the couch and your Chevrolet was packed and Mama tried to give you dishes and I walked back down the short hall to my room and you followed me and held me and told me you were sorry
and I stood there arms dead by my side while a tire gauge
pressed into my eye from your shirt pocket (funny
the things I remember) you were crying and I knew
you loved me and I also knew you weren’t coming back
despite what Mama said.

The Basilisk Tree

Aisling

You didn’t mean to end up here, says Our Lady of Loretto, the lady of the rocky creeks, green closets hiding deer, soundtrack rich with birdsong. She whispers while I sleep here, far from cities, far from where I thought I’d be. Transported by the angels, she comes to Tennessee, the greenest place. I left Atlanta once upon a time and I’m still dreaming. She whispers Hush, and pulls the cotton quilt up to my chin. Palms open, benedictions, blessings: shriek of blue jays cracking silence, paper voice of beech le...

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

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).

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.