2010 by Aline Dolinh

Associate poetry editor Maggie Finch on today’s bonus poem: "2010" dives into reflections of dreams, the versions of ourselves that we have shed, and the whiplash of time. The core of this poem is the sweat created from a bad dream or from suddenly realizing another decade has flown by and the surprising power of memories and dreams to yank our bodies from the present.

2010

I have recurring nightmares in which I am
a girl in twelfth-century Provence. Upon my
pronounced refusal to marry, my parents

decide to ship me off to a nunnery,
but I always barricade myself in my bedroom
and weep hard enough to wake myself up—

I still wince at the thought of convents. In the waking world,
I soothsay with my best friends in pastel strip malls, sibylline
of the Sally Beauty Supply. Our adulthood is the giddy

thrill of artifice—tarring our eyes with periwinkle glitter,
adopting pseudonyms at the ice cream parlor. Most of us
will cleave into different high schools. In three years,

I won’t wear glasses. That girl from sixth-period science
will hang herself from the railroad bridge. I don’t think
we can ever escape our own iconography. We are still

the embryonic goddesses of the parking lot—
skin slicked gold against the quickening dusk,
faces noisy with plastic jewels

and dollar-store lip gloss, still waiting
for our mothers’ minivans
to come take us home.

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Aline Dolinh is a graduate of the University of Virginia, and will be an MFA candidate in poetry at Boston University during 2020-21. In the past, she has served as a poetry reader and Summer Mentor for The Adroit Journal. Her poems have previously been nominated for Best of the Net and appeared in publications including Frontier Poetry, TRACK//FOUR, and Alien Mouth.