Tola Sylvan
Doors

There are doors that are shut
and we make a life behind them.
There are doors that are closed
on rain or lioness.
There are doors whose seams
are felt with lotioned hands, always
in the right direction.
Trapdoors loose confetti,
there are people in the perfect
shape of passage.
Some doors have brass
knockers, mailslots, numbers
and doors go out
onto gardens and let out
onto lack. Dollhouses
have doors and doors
have thin slits beneath which
only paper can slip.
There are doors that must not
be opened and yet you do, they are
and the knob remembers. 
Hard to tell this color 
from that behind the closed 
door, behind the door closed
to the day?
There are doors that have
been laid back against, as if 
ignorance might mean
anything to architecture.
There is a flagstaff of small paddles 
that parts unyieldingly onto fantastic
paths within which 
the door will sway.
There are thresholds 
to be carried over:
maybe you have already passed,
maybe the pockmarks of tide
where you step
stand for something else
entirely and not death.
There are rings
in the door. There is a door 
that has been lifted
totally unhinged
and replaced with space or flap. 
For a while you felt funny
having swallowed your key, performative 
even, like a seal 
having kissed a trainer’s cheek. 
A door that can be open and shut 
is a good door. It can’t ever really be.

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Image by Neslihan Ercan from Pexels
Tola Sylvan is a writer and translator. Her work appears in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, and POETRY, among others. She is the incoming 2026-27 Kapnick Fellow at the University of Virginia.
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