Carol Dorf
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Finding Myself Strange
By finding myself strange, what I mean is not a form of psychosis, but that estrangement where you walk through the world, and instead of déjà vu where everything has already occurred, events you know have happened belong to someone else's life, even down to wondering how that dishtowel with its landscape of sea and compass appeared beside your sink, although you know it is yours because it is in the kitchen by the bedroom with the bed you've arisen from. If you are lucky this is related to travel. If not, your ears are filled with the sound of your pulse and the tintinnabulation of a song you wouldn't have chosen to place on repeat.
Maybe you'd go to the sea; where tide pools would be waiting for you to pick through. You'd join the gatherers you descended from, living off the corners of the fields, sleeping beside lonely stray dogs, playing a shepherd's pipe carved by a crazy old man who had passed the age of his stubborn purple furies.
Each day the western sun would shock with the suddenness of its descent through reds and oranges into blue twilight.
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Carol Dorf's poems appear in Antiphon, Qarrtsiluni, Spillway, OVS, Canary, Sin Fronteras, In Posse Review, Poemeleon, Fringe, Moria, Unlikely Stories, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, Maintenant, The Prose Poem Project, and The Mom Egg. They have been anthologized in Not A Muse, Best of Indie Lit New England, Boomer Girls, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of Talking Writing.