Olivia Dodge
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Chicago
ig: l1vyzzzz & lntlmate
Stories (110)
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How will it end?
We’re halfway through a show I begged you to watch and I’m beginning to think it’s not up to me anymore. Not the tv rotation but maybe everything else. It’s all been laid out and kneaded and covered with saran wrap and you’re not supposed to wake it up too early for risk of eczema or whatever the bread equivalent is and does it even matter when all I could ever want is right in front of me? Days are passing like overloaded shipping containers and not one of them has my name on it. There’s no room for me anyway. My fingers aren’t strong enough to hang on since the incident. But where do I want to go? I’m right where I want to be and I’m not here at all. The frames on the walls are just out of place and my arms feel weaker than they did last week and I just don’t know if this is my decision to make or if it’s already been spelled out and erased and rewritten a thousand times. We’re inching closer to an ending with every sun that rises and sets. I don’t know where it goes when it’s not shining in my eyes. I don’t know what to do with the me that’s sitting right here. Are you watching? How do you think it ends?
By Olivia Dodgeabout 16 hours ago in Poets
Who is Fate
March 5 2026 Forgiveness is a man I met last night. The moon was stuck behind a building and I couldn’t climb anywhere near it. He told me my efforts were hollow— God bless your mind but it’s got no use here. Craters dug into my palms by his crescent nails left me with brandings— belonging to a foe is more than belonging to none at all. More implication, more value, more sense of thing; so I ask Forgiveness a series of questions and he does not answer. What am I meant to do? When the moon watches me and I cannot return the same. My nails have been gone since the second my teeth grew tall, so I am left taking and never giving. I am left in darkness with no moon and no place to be, no thing to which I belong, a foe’s mark and rigid divots in enamel. If every part of this body is branded, where will my soul continue? Where does it stop now that I am fluid in daytime wires? Lampposts line every street forever and he knows I’m weighing them down. The power’s been out this whole time. Can I ask you one last question? Who decides my fate now that I’m dead?
By Olivia Dodge5 days ago in Poets
War In A Paperweight
1/16/26 2:22pm The season is somehow closing and only halfway through and I wonder how much longer we’ve got to endure this war before it’s time to hang up our garments and down a pitcher of billion dollar oil and everyone I know is posting the same videos of women and children being killed by faceless agents but at least I’ve got some syntax to sip and swallow and a simile that slides down like an IV drip in a senior citizen who wanders around an artisanal historical museum with newly plated directional signs mounted just for him because it’s easier to make this one last than to do anything profound or worth writing in a historical script but don’t even worry about it because they’ll pass another law to recount every murder a victory and wouldn’t you like to look back on all these gourds half-squashed and half-witted? It’s all halves it seems and maybe that’s all there is for now but I like to think that sometime it’ll make a whole and maybe it looks a little different than we thought but it’ll have a nice weight to it and the neighbors will keep their windows open when the breeze picks up and we won’t be scared to travel or walk alone or drive next to an unmarked vehicle and maybe it looks like time lost but at least the future is full of seasons that bring more than flurries of hate and maybe it’ll even give everyone a face and a name and somewhere to place the rage that has been slowly coursing through our arms and legs for nearly a (admittedly non chronological) decade and maybe it’s going to be twisted and torn apart like vegetables from their roots but maybe that’s the price we have to pay for a little bit of peace. Half a handful of peace is worth a lot these days. Let’s put ours together.
By Olivia Dodge15 days ago in Poets
A Little Bit Of God
January 2026 I thought I’d spend the night in neon lights on grainy film but my brother is telling me how an eternity of hell is caused by prevalent peace, and who am I to disrupt such a thing? So I found myself in the same skin with the same sights, wondering whether or not I am one of those– do I feel peace? Do I expect more when it is gone? It being everything. We’re running out of time but the car is belching up something strange and we’ve got God in between our eyes nodding along to every apology and plea spoken for our friends and loved ones– they don’t know any better, they’ll come around eventually. He’s telling me about barbed wire guides around lives and ties and wives and lies and, look, the snow is starting to fall so I guess we better hang up soon. But it’s been too long. We’re building fields of skills and realms of distrust and these moments are only seen now, can no longer be read as words, only swept with eyes upon oil pastels or smudged charcoal. It’s a painting of an evening, like Daniel’s soles in Edgar Degas’ mind, but if anything is just it’s the lack of unrest in skin like His and lives like this– okay, so maybe five hours on the phone is a lot if you have a job and you’re trying to cook dinner, but only one of us falls into that gorge and only one of us believes in what lies beneath it. My brother tells me things that sit in my spirit like half an ounce of prospect and a squeeze of bourn, how he tells God to let me in: despite my sins, despite all the moons in between these calls, despite the burning in both of our throats. I do feel peace here. I also feel that my peace is a subpar window job, a pinky’s strength avoiding blizzards inside the bedsheets. I’d like to spend more nights like this, with contrasting disaster living between a speakerphone, and God finding some space in between.
By Olivia Dodge2 months ago in Poets
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 months 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 Dodge4 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 Dodge4 months ago in Poets
