Angela Voras-Hills
Two POEMS
Confessional
I come from a long line of men
who cut holes in their boxer shorts.
If I haven’t shown up somewhere
naked, I haven’t shown up
alone. When I was twelve, I sat
in the bushes in front of my house, luring
boys to my lawn with carrots. After the rain,
I pulled a sewer grate up from the road
to rescue a bunny who’d hopped in.
There are plenty of dirty things you can do
in the sewer. Sex shouldn’t be one of them.
You’d expect to see rats in the sewer,
but I was 26 before I saw a rat in real-life.
It was on my patio, eating sunflower seeds
that had fallen from the birdfeeder.
I brought it in and fed it grapes. I let it crawl
through my fleece blanket and sit
on my shoulder like a parrot. I washed
my hands thoroughly. I washed my body
in the shower and let my husband
scrub my back with a loofah.
Sometimes I ask him to braid my hair.
Controlled Burn
The doe ran into the road, flipped
over our hood and dragged her back legs
across the highway into woods. The same day,
they were killing a man in Oklahoma
who wouldn’t die, they were deciding
when to try again, and men in masks
and bright orange suits set fire to the marsh—
the burning flesh of milkweed and switchgrass.
We are told to be fruitful. We are told
to rejoice. The next day, a hospital bed
is set up in the front room of the farmhouse
whose roof might collapse at any minute, as though
the heavens are aware of the weight
of a minute, as though each minute
responds solely to the sky. It’s illegal
to follow an injured deer
into woods with a gun,
but is it ok to tell a child about heaven
if you don’t believe it exists? Yes,
sing the chorus frogs,
who’d burrowed into the heart
of the marsh to escape the flames.
No, hisses the body
of a vole squashed flat,
perfectly filling
a crack in the blacktop.
Angela Voras-Hills holds an MFA from UMass-Boston and has received awards from The Sustainable Arts Foundation, Key West Literary Seminar, and The Writers’ Room of Boston. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Ohio Review, and Best New Poets, among other journals and anthologies. She is co-founder of Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison, WI, and lives with her family in Milwaukee.