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Wren Donovan

POETRY

Cumberland River Review

Everything Fades & Small Things Return

The town where I grew up is gone and ghosts walk the streets, cruise the mall parking lots, the cracked driveways. They move polaroid-pale without voices,
              no breath and no lungs and no hope.

Does my childhood self wander with hope,
              does she know she is dead?
She smiles from a photograph, artifact. Stars at her throat.

Wisteria climbs up too high for the bumblebees,
drops the sweet scent of an old auntie’s bedroom.

Atoms of scent and decay an...
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...
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.
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.
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