Olivia Dodge
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23 | Chicago
ig: l1vyzzzz & lntlmate
Stories (104)
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1:49am
4/16/25 1:49am I want to breathe death in my larynx and feel loose change in the torn and raggedy pockets of my mother’s cardigan. The water is next to the bed. It’s not cold and never will be. So I guess what’s left is us; we will walk with crooked feet on a path carved by ancient societies. You will borrow my shoes. I will taste vengeance in my tea and convince myself it’s good for my liver. Coffee is fine too. Yes, that’s all. I will think about how I want to kiss you and, the clouds, they will rise to space, and leaves, they will glue their limbs back together. The sun has been out for weeks. This screw isn’t any looser than when I bought it. But I will wake up and I will be in the ship that splits in two and slide my sullen palms across its tundric pillow. I never took swimming lessons so whatever happens is meant to be. I’m sorry if that upsets you. I’m sorry I said that. Anyway, I want to lie nude in wildflowers with ants who build colonies and worms who can’t see. You have a problem with textures. You can’t help it. I could try to tell you things, like how I want my children to understand how little everything is and to not be afraid of the giant fingers that grab at sewing needles in their dreams. I could say it always scared me. It’s just not right. But listen, back to it: I want to indulge in passion and binge affection. Is it a sin if it helps? I will endure the things I am given and inculcate everyone around me to do the same. Do five laps around the block before you respond, whatever helps. I will tell you I want harmony to be palpable and wheels of recognition to be locked in an imperishable gear. Refill the pot if it’s empty. What I want has nothing to do with me. Diagonal tile is cold, you know, and my hair gets crunchy after too long out there. I want this lesson to end.
By Olivia Dodge2 days ago in Poets
The Opera House
10/24/25 4:37am I’m the most sober I’ve been since sober meant anything and Chicago must not believe in autumn anymore because I’ve already got my earmuffs attached to my bag any time I leave the house but it’s not so bad unless my fingers get itchy then it means it’s too cold too fast I just hope my medication isn’t expired because God knows I don’t have the means to pay for it or most things at this point and I’ll blame it on everything except my own will because it doesn’t weigh my arms down as much and they’ve been hurting at night so maybe it’s the breakthrough the doctors have been looking for maybe it’s the key to whatever hypothesis involves the need for a snot rag and numb lips maybe it’s ancient scripture or hieroglyphics and maybe when it’s all done it’ll reveal a map to the Opera House and I won’t have any choice but to spend the last ball on two tickets to The Winter’s Tale and I’ll remember how serotonin doesn’t have to taste like a respiratory infection it can just exist inside me and leave without any weak link or toe-holed sock or empty dispensers of longing
By Olivia Dodge2 months ago in Poets
Time is Linear. Top Story - November 2025.
Time is all-forgiving so I’ve named myself after her. I’ve built an endless soul inside of a shell and slapped my fingerprints on every inch, hoping somehow they’ll find it when we’re gone. I don’t know how to tell you that I would cut open every organ in my doll of a body just to prove the absolute fervor that flows through cells combining pink, and I don’t know if it’s too late to say it. Time would stay, so I will, too. She can’t feel conflicted because there’s only one destination, one task, one rhythm to stay awake. I thought if I created a world, it would keep its eyes open, or at least tell me when it starts to get sleepy. It’s okay to take a nap, but I don’t know what I’d do if the gears stopped turning altogether. I don’t know why the confusion is the most arduous of all these mixed up destinations, but I’ll go downtown to change my name tomorrow. That should bring me a little closer, I think. I’ve built something so exquisitely strange with all these smudges and cells and bruises of seconds, that I’m not sure I could take it apart. I’m not sure I could leave it here to be found in ruins, or ensure the glass jars of my ever-hearts will not go rotten the second I’m gone, or you, or our children. It’s not the building, nor the signatures nor the nails nor the shelves, it’s our bodies that make this collective soul breathe in time. Without us, time does not exist beautifully; or, at least it won’t while I’m still waiting for the fire to be put out.
By Olivia Dodge2 months ago in Poets
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 Dodge2 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 Dodge2 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 Dodge4 months ago in Poets
