Three Poems

by August Della Donna
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​Citrus

“I feel ashamed for all the people / I’ve been kind to knowing kindness / is all it will take.” – Gabrielle Bates, “Strawberries” – Judas Goat

you peel an orange, digging
your thumbnail into the bitter skin.
the juice drips onto the counter,
and you let it attract the ants.
i find myself staring; lost in how much
i feel you do the same to me. you push
yourself into me to get what you want,
and discard me to waste away.
i hate that you equate femininity
with an invitation, my kindness as
weakness inside the gut. as if
there were some structural problems,
like my heart needs a filter,
to strain out the leftover seeds
that the world forgot to pick out.
between the fingertips of some man
that has sunk his nails into my flesh,
i have been torn up, and spit out,
every drop of sweetness left
inside me drank. let the ants come,
maybe they can walk all over me too.



Tasting Silver

- after Barot's "The Lovers"

somehow one of them is still there, like the wet
falcon in the breakdown lane of the highway, ripping​
flesh off roadkill, blood splattering talons in the rain.

another man scrapes up the bones from cracked
pavement, bone marrow still bleeding,
coming, going, taking what he pleases.

but now someone else stays, his sticky midnight
sweat pressing a saint medal against skin,
and soft breaths filling his ribcage.

maybe a single streetlight is blurring our silhouettes,
or a lonely car drives by with its high beams on
flashing warm light onto white walls and movie posters.

suddenly proof of our existence tastes like your chain
ending up in my mouth, and sleep thumbing your eyes shut.



My Mother and I 

i’ve come here from every vertebrae of my mother’s spine,
discs compressing nerves that will revel in her pain forever –
backbreaking weight of three nine-pound babies, selfishly
and helplessly making room for themselves,
​she now stands shorter than me.

i was born of dew on each blade of grass, out of hope
and out of spite, sun kissing away the last remains
of what came before this moment.

i don’t remember much other than feeling a sense of dread,
all my mother’s life, i, an egg, carried with her through every
ache or joy; following the same path as her own
mother, only now, I had taken all the life from her
to continue the cycle, unhinged from the beginning.


August Della Donna's writing focuses on the complexities of trauma and its intersection with personal relationships.