I. Once a daisy was a microphone, and I sang into its petaled star. I had a knack for hiding in the pantry with my books. An orchid for a barrette and an erratic longing. A lollipop stickied my knuckles, purpled my lips. Once I fished an apple from a barrel and triumphed with my mouth. The car was an airplane with arms for wings, my right arm, my brother’s left. A string was a cat’s cradle. A string held a worm that was death to a fish. A string was tied around my loose tooth. A string hung from my mother’s apron, and I clung to it for dear life.
II. Once I stood beneath an overpass, felt a train rumble above my head. Once I leaned on a rough stone wall, sharp against my sacrum. I increased my heart rate until I gasped. My thighs were an altar, holding a pillow and an itch. I was ashamed, thumbed at a mole on my calf. I was warmed by whiskey that burned my tongue. Once I slashed a tire and slapped a man’s face. The stars reached down and snagged my hair at the roots. I speculated, and everything went sideways. I replaced desire with control and remained unchanged. Nothing bad happened, even if I thought it had.
III. Once I portaged my broken body across a melting snowbank. My thighs and sacrum were exposed. Even the earth was bruised and rattling. Once my face was clobbered by cobwebs. A swarm of flies suspected I was dead. The air smelled of hickory smoke and desire. I heard a voice say open your eyes. When I did, I knew that darkness was a fraud. I tied on an apron and pretended to be my mother. Every moment mattered. My history consisted of hiding and haunting. My suffering was only ordinary. I was the worst kind of specimen.
Donna Vorreyer (she/her)
Donna Vorreyer is a writer, artist, and retired public school educator who lives and creates in the suburbs of Chicago where she curates the reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, co-edits the journal Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.
This piece began as a series of short free-writes that used the anaphora of “once” as part of an exploration of memory and how it impacts the present. When I had pages of hand-written phrases, I pulled the ones that were most evocative and wrote into those, focusing on images and actions that clustered around a certain time period. For a long time, they were three separate pieces, until some trusted readers suggested that perhaps they wanted to live together, so I revised with an eye toward connective tissue, especially within the themes of desire and control.
