Molly Dorozenski

Room 512

I hold everything too dear. Everyone says so.
Lately, I've been having some trouble sleeping indoors.
I never know what shoes to wear to bed. I can't imagine anything
good enough, but I also feel funny with bare feet.
We talk about replacing my hands with branches.
I take a walk and I think I see all kinds of forest animals
in the city. A deer I guess, or something quick.
It is because of what I am either reading or eating.
The deer takes the blame for all my mistakes.
The deer runs into the intersection and slows the traffic.
I tried to mend all the old recipes.
I use an actual telephone, and it rings and rings.
Someone (not me) invented the idea of horrible praise.
Now I compliment the worst things and it is not my fault.
I recommend sad movies that make people want to have sex.
I tell everyone I love the city. I suggest a sequined jacket.
Then everyone is telling me I am pretty in ways I do not like.
I check into the hotel where terrible things happen.
There isn't even a room key.
You just take the elevator and close your eyes.



The Conservatory

The wallpaper vibrates like childhood.
Tender reeds in the library. A grand gateau.
The special paper that makes up the music.
Aussie rules. Roller derbies. Consumption.
I put everything down and breathe life into it.
I put the portraits on the wall.
I can hear you through that same wall.
We grew up together. The marsh is dead,
and the birds that live in it are dead, also.
Do you remember when the waters were clearer?
You decide it's time to begin smoking a pipe.
Even though you are young. And I am younger.
This is funny: I walk into a cluster of sadness.
My mother and my father are there.
Outside, there are rafts we can take down the river.
And we take them. And we take them. And we take them.

Molly Dorozenski writes poetry and fiction in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She has a BA in English from Yale University and an MFA in Creative Writing from UMASS Amherst. She is an Editor at Lungfull! Magazine and co-curates Lungfull!’s reading series at Zinc Bar on Sundays. Her poems have been published in places like The Boston Review, American Letters and Commentary and Notnostrums. She works as Greenpeace’s US Media Director, a global organization that campaigns to stop the destruction of our oceans, forests and climate.