Poem on a Line by Heather Dohollau

Il faut attendre dans l’ailleurs d’ici
(You have to wait in the elsewhere of here)
—tr. Hoyt Rogers

You could have taken a seat on the settee of yesterday;
you will lounge on the lawn of the future,
though now it’s just seeds and raked dirt.
But meanwhile, you have to wait
in the elsewhere of here, and it’s
never easy. This is where the heart is;
there’s no place like it. But the grass is always greener.
You’ll want to be somewhere else, lonely hunter.
Where can you find happiness? Click your heels together.
Long shadows linger on the lawn.

Why I Am Unhappy with My Face in the Mirror

Because too many lines sparkle in radiants
from around my mouth, stamp their angry parenthses
at the corners, and shadows cast a blue trail
under my eyes. Because my hair’s not flossy silver-
blonde, but a real frizz joint of mouse brown,
especially when the humidity is high. Or, after a shower,
flat as the empty earth on some high northern plain.
Sometimes crows spring from my throat
when I want to be singing.

Still, this is the face
I’ve grown into, every mark or scar a step
of the journey, like the hooks and stays of a corset,
or the railroad tracks that go off in the distance,
until they seem to be part of the sky.

Feminism

When I was a girl, I loved to play with the buttons
in my mother’s sewing chest: mother-of-pearl,
tortoise shell, velvet covered, rhinestone studded;

some with two tiny holes, like nostrils, some
with four tiny holes, like stars. Unlike snowflakes,
many alike. More like the shells that litter the sea,

or stars in the opaline sky. So many choices
to pick from, and how to decide?
So many options, in the big button box of life:

career/family, home/office
(all women are working women)
but always, some stitches are coming unraveled,

there’s a worn spot where an elbow’s poked through,
always there’s something that needs to be mended,
or, by changing the buttons, a bright new look given to old cloth.