12-30-2025
Lisa Dordal
WELCOME
Flipping the remote, I keep landing
on the hotel’s Welcome Channel.
Hello, a woman says. White woman,
pretty smile. May I have a minute of your time?
Be as alert as you are at home, she says.
Pretty woman, concerned for my safety.
She keeps walking towards me—there,
behind everything else. Like fear behind the eyes.
I keep flipping, taking in the news of the week.
People are protesting in the streets:
This Pussy Fights Back. No Ban, No Wall.
Never invite strangers into your room.
Pretty smile, pretty woman. As pretty
as my mother was when she was alive.
Pretty as she was in my dream. Be alert,
the woman says. As alert as you are at home.
I never knew, on Tuesdays, what she’d look like—
my mother, who drove to the Del Mar College
of Hair Design to get dolled up cheap
by a stranger. Sometimes, large, loopy curls.
Other times, tight and small—tucked in
like something sleeping. Use the viewport,
the woman says, if someone knocks on your door.
Hepburn-chestnut one week to a sassy blonde
the next. In the dream, she is reading
from my book. She looks happy.
Keep the doors and windows locked,
the woman says. In five pages,
my mother will be dead. First, the bottles
hidden in bookcases throughout
the house. Then, the heart wing. Locked,
the woman says, at all times. My mother
glances up. She is reading in the voice she used
for Sounder and The Chronicles of Narnia.
She reads as if the woman she is
will not die; as if the woman who dies
will not be her. As if she is not even there.
Like when she learned about my attempts—
aspirin, then the knife, my hand like Abraham’s
over Isaac. Nice story, my mother said.
We had learned to slip out of ourselves.
To squeeze our consciousness through a hole
the size of a dime. We were small inside
our bodies. My body is sin, she told me once.
Be alert, the woman says. As alert
as you are at home. Nice story, she said.
WATER LESSONS
My mother loved the beach at 57th Street
where she’d stand at the water’s edge,
her head bent to a magazine.
I never saw her swim.
*
Sometimes I still hear her
walking the halls of our house—
the sound of ice clinking
against the inside of her glass.
The sound of her breathing
on the other side of the door.
*
Alcohol is absorbed into the body
through the bloodstream.
Alcohol affects every part of the body.
Liver, stomach, eyes, brain.
Heart.
*
Inside the Titantic,
there is a glass of water
still sitting on a bureau—
the strange physics
that allowed drowning,
not breaking.
*
Sometimes I still hear her
climbing the stairs of our house.
The sound of ice against glass.
*
As a child, I feared falling
into the soft, leaky ice
that barely covered the fields
where we skated.
*
In Leningrad, I was told not to drink
the water. It could cause illness;
in rare cases, death.
*
Salmon can smell the distant waters
of their birth, towards which they swim
when they are ready to spawn.
*
In Leningrad, I drank the water.
ARS POETICA
My mother is saying something I still can’t hear.
And I want to believe there is a door.
Sometimes I dream I am being led through darkness.
And I wouldn’t call her death “natural.”
So many rooms were closed off before we knew they were there.
And I was the one no one believed.
And my father still insists her liver was fine.
It was her heart, he says, just her heart.
-from Water Lessons by Lisa Dordal--celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Lisa Dordal received a Master of Fine Arts (in poetry) from Vanderbilt University in 2011 and a Master of Divinity, also from Vanderbilt, in 2005. She currently serves as Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Vanderbilt. Lisa is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize and the Robert Watson Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Image, RHINO Poetry, Narrative, Great River Review, Best New Poets 2015, The Sun, Cave Wall, Bellevue Literary Review, Christian Century, CALYX, Ninth Letter, Whale Road Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, Rove Poetry, The Greensboro Review, Vinyl Poetry, storySouth, Connotation Press, and The Feminist Wire. Her first full-length collection of poetry, MOSAIC OF THE DARK, was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and is available from Black Lawrence Press or wherever books are sold. Her second full-length collection, WATER LESSONS, was listed by Lambda Literary as one of their most anticipated books for 2022, and is also available from Black Lawrence Press or wherever books are sold.
