Directions to Your College Dorm by Faith Shearin

All hallways still lead to that room
with its ceiling so high it might have been

a sky, and your metal bed by the window,
and your crate of books. First,

you must walk across the deep
winter campus to find your friend

throwing snowballs that float
for years. Then, open our letters:

shelves of words. You will find
our coats, our awkwardness, the tickets

from the trains that witnessed
our confusion. Love was the place

where we became as naked
as morning; it was dangerous and

dappled and we visited its shores
with suitcases and maps from childhood.

I remember our shadows growing
on your wall while a candle

swallowed itself. You kept a single
glass of water on a desk and it trembled

whenever we danced.



Faith Shearin's books include: The Owl Question, Telling the Bees, and Orpheus, Turning. Her work has been read aloud on The Writer's Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry.

"Directions to Your College Dorm" first appeared in Orpheus, Turning, published by Broadkill River Press, winner of the 2015 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, and is published with the permission of the author.