Fifty-Nine and Feeling…
Everyone wants a shortcut to longevity—a procedure to drain
age from the face, to resupple the muscle. Some desire a natural
cure—turmeric and black pepper to erase arthritis, apple cider
vinegar to flatten a post-menopausal paunch. I have tried too
long to reverse the clock and the scale. Instead I should embrace
the softening—the world a blur without my glasses, the curves
of my body plush for touching. Laugh lines remind me that this face
has split silly with joy, and each ache and twinge is a signal flag
spelling out alive. I’m not just saying this so I can eat a cheeseburger
without guilt. Or maybe I am. Maybe I’m just tired of the hard sell
of Youth. Perhaps it’s archaeologists who know the truth.
In any fine museum, the most revered specimens are the oldest,
the vessels and bones that speak through their shattering—
I was useful. I was beautiful. I am still here.
Skeleton Key
My ribs pickup sticks, my skull a bowl for cherry pits and pyrite, a cauldron to simmer the marrow into song. The teeth from my jawbone strung like pearls with a clasp of hammer and anvil, adorning my laddered neck. Beneath the leaded apron, with each thunk of exposure, hymns are humming. After, the machine shows me arranged in the usual way, and the doctor reads the film. Minor lapses in density. Arthritic calcifications. Small fissures and lesions. But he doesn’t know the real story. I must break the language to tell it myself: Once upon a time there was a girl whose skin was jeweled, whose sentences were filled with bones and ghosts.
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Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016), and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. She lives in the suburbs of Chicago, where she serves as an associate editor for Rhino Poetry and hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.