Olivia Dodge
Bio
Chicago
ig: l1vyzzzz & lntlmate
Stories (110)
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IF FOUND / IF DEAD
IF FOUND / IF DEAD Here’s What You Need To Know: Every thing I’ve ever seen, I’ve loved. I’ve lived the lives of every person in mine, and I know the things they’ve done and the things they’ve grieved and the things they’ve endured and the things they’ve adored, and I’ve felt every thing they’ve felt. I’ve been a stray and I’ve been an example, and this is the thing for which I have been fighting: gifting a spoonful of amenity to each inch, each meter, each ounce of thing that has ever been. My feelings are felt everywhere and my blessings are passed on and my receptions are plastered in the rooms which made us the thing we are, people, places, ideas, stories. I’ve been as hopeless and as ecstatic and as anguished and as passionate and as terrified as every one of you. I have the ever-greatest unmeasurable amount of adoration for every thing I have ever touched and seen and smelt and heard, and you are one of them. You have been in a part of my life that had never come before, and I will miss it in the next. I will dream of some thing I cannot place, and I will admire you, this thing, when I am contemplating the feet that hang from my bed-frame. You will be a sound I heard in second grade and a scent I recognized on my lunch break fourteen years later, and you will be the streak of paint that completes a yearly masterpiece in some studio I never got around to this time. Who knows what the name will be, perhaps an homage to you, perhaps to me, perhaps any thing I have felt and seen, any thing I have written in ink, any thing I have typed with nail-bitten pads, any color the sky has ever been. There are more colors than this, you know. There are so many things you will learn when you join me, and I will await your arrival with pistachio-palms and cool-mint-hair, and it’s not a cloud or a heavenly home, but a place only we have seen, or smelt, or touched, or lived. I will not mourn you while my feet hang lonesome and I will not count the heartbeats that lead to our re-unity, but I will admire the imitations of your spirit and I will leave a graze of green upon it and the stain will visit you with hopeful eyes and security above every inch of ground we’ve ever known, and you will feel my hand on your arm and you will not be afraid, not be glum, not be pensive in any way that does not mirror an applause— an ovation of rave that reaches lands beyond sea. If I am no longer next to you, take these words as mandate, as a scrape from bowls sat fixed in stainless-(if you say so)-steel and shunned for the exact amount of time it takes for it to start recruiting the space, spreading whiffs of all things bad like a middle-school locker room: Believe in the prospect of every tear; but still smile as you are cleaning my pants to find solace in a closet for the next three years until a little guy named courage walks into the room and they make their way to the thrift shop. Believe in the growth of your ability to love and lose, and believe in the things you experience now, here— the combination stargazers and easy-on-the-eyes carnations, the dust of my entire soul in a crafted-forevermore home, the bellflowers, the cherry wood, the golden trumpet and the piano and the air that is standing between us. Believe in the belief that I am a believer— in purpose, in guidance, in empathy, in morality and sacrifice, passion and faith, devotion and resilience, and throw your misgivings to a wicker basket and feel belief in your pores for the certainty that I, the one whom you grieve, am a believer in the immortality of my life. Not a mansion in the sky, but a desk with four half-gone tubes of burnt sienna and phthalo blue, and I am forever the person you know me to be, and you are forever the person who made it to me, and we are forever the people to live and foresee: that I am inside of your body and inside of your home, and you will feel sad and you will feel lost but you will not find room for blame, as blame has done no good. I want you to extract that wing entirely from the process, and I want you to throw out anything you desire, and re-paint the walls to some mauvey-earthtone or whatever finds its way between your fingers in a hell-lit warehouse, and I want you to break the drywall down if that’s what it takes for you to hear my voice. I am never away— I am every thing. I am always with you. I have seen you, and I have loved you, and I have been with you in every sense of it. I am your heart. I am the wind and the sand and the reflection on your sunset windows, and I am the pen you find in the bottom of your purse that glides like wrapping paper, and I am you, I am you, I am you.
By Olivia Dodge4 months ago in Poets
Mother’s Sun
10/30/25 I think of Claire Keegan when the leaves turn yellow. I think she would want it that way. I think of you when the wind hurts my ears. I think of you when the sun hits my face and when the homeless man at the bus stop blesses me for looking in his direction. He shows me his teeth and tells me God bless you, God bless you, the sun is on us, God bless you. He shows me his cross made up of eight seashells, tells me it’s his mother, traces horizontally, Sea to Sea. He tells me we’re all going through something and it will all be okay, tells me his mother died two years ago at ninety-eight, God bless you, God bless you. I bless him in return, with God, with the last dollar I have, with the tears that run down my neck. He says he’s not doing well, this will come back to me ten times, thank you, thank you, thank you. I hope he finds the sea and it blesses him forever. I hope the sun and the yellow leaves find him wherever he goes. I hope you think of me when the trees turn golden brown and start to fall like lost love letters. I hope you think of me forever. I would want it that way.
By Olivia Dodge5 months ago in Poets
September
9/2/25 9:55pm I’m cross-legged on the sidewalk and there’s a cloud that looks like my elementary school, they upgraded the busses on the north side so it matches your funeral-inspired eggplant drapes and I can’t tell anyone about it because it doesn’t make sense to someone with living relatives, my legs are getting stiff on the concrete and elementary cloud turned into something like a salsa rendition with goats as butlers, the drapes look a lot worse than you thought they would but it was that or the electric bill so we’re eating dinner in the dark until you find the courage to pack it up and bring it to Whole Foods, we’re doing everything in the dark until someone digs their hands into the couch and finds the lyrics to that tune we wrote last year, you said it had notes of autumn’s song and I laughed at you then but now it makes sense because my family is getting smaller and the leaves don’t sound as crunchy anymore, my legs don’t feel as strong as anymore, my ceiling-fan lights don’t seem as necessary as before, and my windows don’t do anything but mock the solitude in our house that does nothing but pay homage to every grave next door.
By Olivia Dodge6 months ago in Poets
The Shortest Poem Is A Name. Top Story - August 2025.
8/5/25 THE SHORTEST POEM IS A NAME After Anne Michaels The shortest poem is a name. It is fewer letters than breaths, less thought, more familiarity. It is yours to have and mine to harbor, yours to sustain, mine to fatten with vows that hit your larynx like a medicinal drip. The shortest poem is a hum of every sound that has ever been, and it sounds like nothing at all. It is the quickest fleet of fleeting feelings, the smallest feeling of feat that eats at the things you eat— anything to obscure the sunset view through the windshield— anything to keep the light out. The shortest poem writes itself in agony, reaching around limbs and rooms of consciousness to cross a letter that makes no difference to the thing itself. It plugs its ears when I set the dinner table, holds its breath when I open the blinds, closes its eyes when I say its name. I cannot hold the hand of a thing too small to hear, but I can paint the walls with great reflections of life— too big to feed and too slow to feel for more than the fleeting fleet it takes to reach between a rib and write The End.
By Olivia Dodge7 months ago in Poets
June
6/28/25 In June there were wasps at every corner. There were men and women and children with blown out feathers like peacocks or the figure in that field now floating in every direction at the sound of fire. Fear of being stung is just as bad as popcorn lung or tachycardia to some people. Same levels of adrenaline and whatnot. It’s been beautiful for a year but the news sites keep writing the same flood over and over again and we’re starting to worry about the pipes. You’re starting to give in to the thing that I needed your strength to stop. Now we’re using plastic cups instead of glassware because the kids have nowhere else to go so they gather at every turn and they don’t get paid to be here so it’s no use saying excuse me. They don’t even pull the legs of their pants up so it’s leaving tracks all over the floor. In June it’s cold and then it’s hot and the rain should stop sooner or later. The families in soft sand don’t think about peeling off denim skirts in the bathrooms because they have a roast that’s ready at home and the kids are starting to get hungry. Don’t worry— he took the feathers off. He’ll make sure your bowl is bone-free and he called his friend to update the plumbing and, even so, nothing could take your mind away from the plate in front of you. Wasps don’t build their nests in places they aim to destroy and June doesn’t hold off disaster for anyone. Pack an umbrella and drench your skin in sticky glow. Just because it’s their only choice doesn’t mean they aren’t grateful.
By Olivia Dodge7 months ago in Poets
