ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Unrivered (forthcoming, 2025), 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 hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey and is a co-founder/editor of the new journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.
Also by Donna Vorreyer:
A House of Many Windows
Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story
To Everything There Is
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
Detente
The Lost Art of Giving Up
April 9, 2025
Aubade Ending in Allegro
Sludged and duct-taped, I shrink from
high beams. I used to hopscotch from thought
to thought, but now I am fallow-frozen, bamboozled
by blue light. I forget the combination to remove
my armor, clatter down the stairs in search of
tiny white bullets to load into the chamber of
my body. Still you patience your way through
my popsicle brain, my gaping hollows. Only you
can yank me out of nostalgia’s amber, pull me from
my umami wallow into orange-bright morning.
So untime my limbs to limber, and kiss me into
ambition. Achtung, baby. Speed up my RPMs
until I am nothing but spinning gibberish,
until I am even better than the real thing.
In a class with the brilliant Alina Stefanescu that taught musical terminology and concepts as a companion to poetics, we were asked to consider the meanings of the terms in musical scores and to experiment with them in writing. I loved the idea of taking the term allegro, which implies a quickness and liveliness, and pairing it with an aubade, which tends to value languor and slowness. I also wanted to push the lyric language to the edge of near nonsense, using invented words and focusing on sound. I didn't plan for it to be a sort of modern sonnet, but the anaphora of the last two lines left me with a satisfying couplet ending.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
