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I Never Cared for Skinny Angels
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It’s not that I don’t appreciate the effort.
I do, I really do. But a malnourished angel
ain’t doing me any favors. They need
to be cherubic, well fed with the afterbirth
of sin. They need to glisten a bit in the sun,
forget to shave their legs, drop spaghetti
on their gowns, make a mess at Outback,
eat ribs on Beale Street & burp a bit
to let the servers know they enjoyed
the food.
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My angel squeezes sideways onto a city bus
in Geneva to tell us what stop to take to see
her favorite church, disappears when we turn
to thank her. We see her later that day eating
chocolate-and-raspberry torte at a sidewalk cafe,
wiping her mouth and chin with a white linen
napkin.
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She recites prayers of abdication, full
of regret for slipping up, for imperfection, but
it’s unnecessary. I cry with her
in the back yard with a million fireflies
who lay an electric carpet for our feet.
She grabs the cigarette from my mouth,
inhales, holds it in like a ghost breath, exhales
her smoke into my field of vision.
I remind her that there’s strawberry cheese-
cake in the back of the fridge.
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John Dorroh was born with a pen in his hand. He wrote his first poem on the bathroom wall with his mother’s red lipstick. He graduated to novel-writing at the age of 12 with an adventure book called “Buck’s Way”. His poetry has appeared in about 125 journals, including Selcouth Station, Os Pressan, Feral, Burningword, and North Dakota Quarterly. He also dabbles with short fiction and the occasional rant. His first chapbook was published in the spring of 2022.
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North of Oxford 