John Dorroh – bio
John Dorroh, “J.D.,” taught high school science for almost 30 years and lived to tell about it. He is a writer who has had some success with White Trash Nekid poetry, micro-fiction, and poetry. He has also written for a regional newspaper as a weekly business columnist. He lost the county spelling bee in the 6th grade to Connie Dick and went on to become a recognized swimmer and Moon Pie-eating contestant.
“To All the Old Attics”
by John Dorroh
attics are horrifying places– spiders and cobwebs,
old mannequins from an era when women wore skirts
and dresses, plied colored clay onto their skin every morning
with palette knives
her attic cries out for attention, for a drink of water,
for music to fill up the gray space, for a magnet of some sort
to pull in all the tiny dust particles that the universe
spit out of its big black hole a million years ago, specks that
still blow in a tortured air, a veil around this planet
the smell of christmas cookies never reached the upstairs
space, tucked under the ceiling like a fire blanket, ready
for an emergency, but yet, every minute is an emergency
when one cannot breathe
most ignore the attic, its stacks of look and time and
good housekeeping from decades when we were dating in
station wagons with five speeds on a stick, shopping for specials
at mom-and-pop markets where a can of English peas was 12 cents,
when there was demarcation for black and white
we dive headfirst into stacks and told stories about every single
piece, every sauce pan and its lid, each rusted roller skate, every
box of Halloween decoration. i am living for a chance to open
the windows up here, to let new air into old lungs, but these frames
have been nailed down and glued tight with hardened putty, dried
like cement, a ploy for things to remain in a stationary existence
attics need to breathe, fling their histories up into space where the stars
are so forgiving for things we should have done differently all along
