Ode to a Mosquito
Ode to a Weathered Door
With diamond-shaped eyes, mail slot its slit mouth, what once was dark green—now faded teal strips worn away
by time and storms, its peeling reveals grey wood patches. Iron bars above and below fix its hinges to the entryway.
If I were a painter I’d strive to distress my canvas like this. So why do I frown at my weathered
skin—see no beauty, no art? Though Time, an action painter, has also splattered its brush over me.
Isn’t It Funny
He was in one of those bands that played in Central Park when I was sixteen, virginal,
I used to dance in front of him sway my arms overhead when I was Joni Mitchell’s twin
with long straight blonde hair. I bought their albums, I was a fan. Almost fifty years later
through a dating site we spoke by phone, he wanted to hear me masturbate, invited me over, would
crack open his door to slip me a blindfold, and lead me in. An arrangement that didn’t appeal—
not to see him but for me to be revealed. We never met. Why think of that almost-scene? Is it
because I’m in an erotic drought and almost anything might quench my thirst?
Against Novelty
Living in a grey city with a bricked-up heart, a river too polluted and swift to swim in—I admit I must go elsewhere by the sea, yet what do I strive for?
To sink into the new and make it home. To find my favorite café, beach, ice cream shop, and through daily repetition to make the alchemical shift into routine
like a well-worn sandal that fits me best. I eschew the new for its own sake. Imbibe the same view each dusk and dawn from my patio—not to become
unresponsive to such beauty but to bathe in it, allow its familiar shapes and ever-changing hues to enter and deepen my outsider’s first-day
wonder at the new into something local that I already knew. A living déjà vu.
Sharon Dolin– Associate Editor, Barrow Street Press,
Author of Imperfect Present and Translator of Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga,
Shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize.
sharonjdolin@gmail.com
www.sharondolin.com