John Dorroh
Not Such a Horrible Way to Go
Texas fire ants can kill you. If you lie down at a picnic,
they will devour your uneaten ham-and-Swiss sandwich,
then attack anything sweet: your eyes and spit
that’s collected at the corners of your mouth, the crusted gunk
that dries on top of your tear ducts. Fire ants work quickly
like pixies on speed. You cannot outrun them so don’t
even think about it. Find water quickly. Douse yourself in a jet
stream from a powerful hose. Dive headfirst into a lake.
It might be your only hope. If there is no water nearby,
close your eyes, grit your teeth, and pray. If you’ve never prayed
before in earnest, this might be the time. I can’t tell you how long
it will last – this twisted plunge into Nature’s dark side – but scant research
indicates that you will reach a point where it doesn’t matter any longer.
You see yourself as a dissolving sugar crystal, and then there is purple light
all around you.
You soul does what you’ve always believed it would do.
The Wrap-around Porch That No One Ever Uses Until It’s Too Late
They found my body on the back porch under a mattress
under a bed on top of the wooden porch with seven sleek slats
missing so that I could see the dirt under the house, the coiled
copperhead with the silver fang, the one my grandfather
told me about when I was a kid. He will live forever he told me.
I reported myself to the coroner who took her time to arrive
with a team to pry my jellied body up from the wood
which had begun to rot last month. No one had missed me.
In four weeks no one missed me anywhere. I was the walking dead.
This is how I’ve felt for years. The conversations that built
walkways into the clouds where I was a mere droplet
of condensation. The irises bloomed and then their buds
fell off onto the ground. Dandelions danced all over my spine.
Kids picked them by the hundreds and blew their feathered seeds
into the air. The lightning bugs came & went. And there I was
slumped in a lawn chair with my face in the coals of the burn pit.
I think I put myself to bed that night. It’s all a blur.
I think there was some sort of memorial with people I knew.
My niece told a few stories about me, and my sister said
We never understood what he was doing. They said it was
the lowest attendance of any service held in that church.
Tell us again who he was. What did he do?
He was a placeholder, a bank, a dog sitter, a science teacher,
someone who kept the lights on after storms passed through.
That’s all.
Okay then. Let’s get on with our lives. I have an important package
to pick up off the front porch.
John Dorroh has never fallen into an active volcano, nor has he caught a hummingbird. However, he did manage to bake bread with Austrian monks and drink a healthy portion of their beer. Five of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Others have appeared in over 100 journals, including Feral, North of Oxford, River Heron, Wisconsin Review, Kissing Dynamite, and El Portal. He had two chapbooks published in 2022.
