BOBO
My brother’s Velveteen Rabbit for 54 years. His right ear still jingles.
Photo © Jane Dorn
A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home. —Rumi
What. Even.
Photo © Jane Dorn
Today I learned that a two-inch-long piece of Scotch tape is capable of knocking the wind out of a full-grown orphan. Bittersweet surprise.
Photo © Jane Dorn
This road, this sky, these errands kept me going while my mother was dying. Just a two-lane road off the highway, it was the route I took to pick up the medications that hospice ordered for her. For the last two months of her life, I would stop the car, get out, take a photo with my phone each time the sky said HOPE.
At first, I thought my mom had likely taken this photo. On second glance, it appears to have been taken from the height of a tadpole-baptizing girl or her slightly older, taller brother.
I saw Lynda Carter once,
(before she was Wonder Woman)
riding in the lead car
a convertible
in the Dothan, Alabama
Peanut Parade.
Dothan was full
of Christians and tadpoles.
I tried to make Believers
of my creek-caught critters,
saying to every damn one
I baptize you
in the name of The Father
The Son
and The Holy Spirit.
Amen.
as i caught and moved them
(cupped in a creek-water-wrinkled paw)
from one Cool-Whip bowl of muddy water
to another.
But back to Lynda Carter
and how she rolled through that town
of lost tadpoles,
their small muddy evangelist
watching
just sure
for one moment
that she was
somewhere.
—Dorn
EVER
by Meghan O'Rourke
Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.”
They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
Never? Never ever again to see you?
An error, I aver. You’re never nothing,
because nothing’s not a thing.
I know death is absolute, forever,
the guillotine-gutting-never to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever”
and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after.
I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver:
You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You’re gone. Nothing, never—ever.
WALKING ON WATER (MAYBE BAREFOOT SKIING), ASHEVILLE NC
Photo © Jane Dorn
ZAP SHACK SELFIE TRIPTYCH
Recently shown in the Artbomb Studios Spring Exhibition. I tried to take a photo each day I was at the Cancer Institute for treatments. These are three of 31 or so. I lost count of days, treatments, and photos along the way.
Photos © Jane Dorn
SUMMER NIGHTS
A recent work included in the Museum of Design Atlanta exhibition Text Me: How We Live in Language, curated by Debbie Millman
Image and text © Jane Dorn