CALLING OUT THE NUMBERS

by Sharon Olson

DOGE Has Decimated the Institute of Museum and Library Services —artnet, March 31, 2025

In some retellings the Library of Alexandria
was burned by Julius Caesar, accidentally,
a casualty of war.

No accident the flashlights of the Doge,
peering with damning light, threatening
the rolled-up scrolls sitting pretty
next to 21st-century flash drives.

I can think of Dewey numbers 
the Great Leader would not like: 
sexual relations both gay and straight, 
301.424, public measures to prevent 
disease, 614.5, the library as refuge 
for the homeless, 362.5, Palestine 
and Israel shelved together, 956.94, 
even something so benign
as 351.1, federal jobs.

Not a bad idea to digitize, lest the temperature
rise to Fahrenheit 451, and only an AI librarian
available to operate the hose.


Sharon Olson is a retired California librarian who now lives in Annapolis, Maryland. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

McCAFFREY'S MOM

by Sharon Olson

Lisa and Christian McCaffrey

49ers Star Christian McCaffrey’s Mom Jokes They're ‘Boycotting’ Taylor Swift Until After Super Bowl —People, February 5, 2024

A clever one, she is, who realized the dilemma,

the whole family Swifties,

her four sons and father Ed,

couldn’t get the music out of their heads.

They tried a prayer circle, but even 

though their second son’s 

a Christian, it wasn’t their schtick, 

seemed phony.

Who knows what the Niners 

listen to on those pods,

during the game is it Kittle wide left 

or "Everything Has Changed"?

One thing’s certain, Mom said,

we’re putting Taylor under wraps,

flipping the volume off

whenever she comes on.

Maga nation frets about the halftime,

what strange potions might appear,

the Stanford Band, their mascot Tree?

The game goes to the swift, SF or KC.

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who has recently moved to Annapolis, Maryland. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019. 

NOT MERELY A GENTLE PROD

by Sharon Olson

“Ecstasy of St. Teresa” by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

As Bernini would have it, Teresa entered a quasi-orgasmic

state, calling out to her would-be husband Jesus! and explaining

later how the prick of the arrow exulted and burned at the same

time

and I think of my Mr. Moderna, the jolt he gives me, the fever,

the chills, the battle royale he is willing to undergo on my behalf, 

even though he is not entirely faithful, as I hear others claiming 

him

think of the lily and its deep chamber penetrated by the sharp

bill of its hummingbird swordsman, we do not hear her cry out 

or think he has forsaken her by darting into the orifices

of all the neighbor lilies

and yet in this year of multiple piercings, the throngs of the would-

be vaccinated circling in the vestibules, the ante-chambers

of their chosen clinics, the buzzing and murmuring will be

echoed even

by the hosanna of the seventeen-year emerging cicada swarm,

Brood X they are called, like the crucifix but here only a reference

to the number 10, the power of their song jacked up to the nth

degree, what has got into them, what probe, what stick?

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who has recently moved to Annapolis, Maryland. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019. She will be getting her second dose of Moderna today.

SPACE AVAILABLE

by Sharon Olson

They call it the landscape of fear,
the sense that humans are near,
ears pricked to catch the menace
of car engines, commerce unabated.

So the deer were always nearby,
watching for safe spaces, as if
they might be able to read
the stickers on library doors.

The map has now been redrawn,
if the foxes can come out of hiding,
say the deer, then so can we,
nobody seems to be stopping us.

We are now hosting a family of deer,
our yard a new venue for outdoor dining,
our menu of specials features straight-up
hostas, day lilies, rosehips for dessert.

In dark of night, though, a new creature
has joined the neighborhood menagerie,
squirrels and mice beware, the fisher cat
pierces the silence with its strangling call.

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.

ODE TO MY SHOPPER

by Sharon Olson

I was seventy-one and still counting
when I counted the grocery bags arriving
at my front door, each one labelled
I guess for the shopper’s convenience,
some mnemonic only he had derived,
Poems 1 of 8, Poems 2 of 8, and so forth,
and they were like poems, each item
of slightly different size and voice,
tuna can haikus next to sonnets of milk.

I chalked it up to coincidence, until
the next week new bags came, this time
marked Lyric 1 of 7, Lyric 2 of 7, so
we knew we were in some sort of
telepathic, telegrammatic finger-
tapping sync-apathy, as if he knew
I must write poems and would eat
to write them, not eating words
but snippets of lyric, edible syllables.

The market has stipulated one week
between orders, and I am as I said
earlier seventy-one and still counting.
And so I find myself wondering
what the next code will bring, what
subliminal message my messenger
will write to signal our connection.
He must be a poet, too, composing
behind the front lines and so essential.

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian, 71 and still counting. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019. She lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey where along with everyone else she waits it out. Her grocery bags truly did arrive marked as mentioned in the poem.

STRAIT OF HORMUZ,AN OPERA IN ONE ACT

by Sharon Olson

Photo credit: (AP/Shutterstock/Salon)

Everyone assumed it was unmanned,
everyone it appears but the Drone family,
Papa Drone who had proclaimed
he could fly the damned thing blind,
Baby Drone, excited about his first flight
but not tall enough to see out the windows,
and Mrs. Drone, who suddenly lamented
her husband’s lack of hands-on experience,
doubting whether he could really turn
the craft around on a dime, such that
when the familia found themselves
engulfed, bobbing among flotsam,
she cried out even though no one
could hear, Won’t someone please 
bring me the head of Pompeo?

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019. She currently lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey where she is a member of the U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative, and also of the Cool Women Poets critique and performance group.

MEDITATION IN ROME

by Sharon Olson

School had not started and students at Rancho Tehama Elementary were still in the playground when staffers first heard gunshots in the neighborhood Tuesday morning, said Richard Fitzpatrick, superintendent of the Corning Union Elementary School District. “The bell had not rang, roll had not been taken, when the shots were heard,” he said. Staffers immediately began to lock down the campus, rushing students into classrooms and under desks when the gunman came around the corner toward the school, Fitzpatrick said at a press conference Tuesday. The gunman crashed through the front gates of the school in a white pickup truck traveling at high speed, he said. Authorities say this was part of a larger rampage through the rural community in Northern California that left five dead and 10 wounded. The man came out of the truck with a semiautomatic rifle and ran into the center of the school’s quad and began firing at windows and walls as staffers, including the school’s custodian, rushed students into classrooms under gunfire. One student was shot in a classroom while under a desk, Fitzpatrick said. That student was said to be stable. —LA Times, November 14, 2017

The gaze from Sant’Eustachio Il Caffe
reveals a stag atop the nearby church,
a crucifix sprouting between its antlers.
Stirring my cappuccino I think of Hubertus,
as Eustace is called in Belgium,
the hunter who saw his vision of the crucifix
in the forest of the Ardennes,
and asked his would-be victim
what he might do.

The stag counseled good hunting,
trimming the ranks of the herd.
I think of the X’s spray-painted
onto the carcasses of “fallen” deer
in my neighborhood,
marked for hauling away.

Fallen perhaps over-used as a euphemism
for dead soldiers, as if they had merely
stumbled, breaking rank in procession
towards the enemy at Waterloo,
Khe Sanh, Kanduz.

In my America gun cases beckon,
designer bags hold personal revolvers,
video games tally the number killed
for the game player with his joy stick,
the one who flunked anger management
and blamed the schoolmates who mocked
and bullied him, who now focuses his aim
on the heads of children in the crosshairs.

Inside the church lie the bones of Sant’Eustachio.
Painted onto the dome above, the wings
of the Holy Spirit, flung wide.

Sharon Olson is a retired librarian, a graduate of Stanford, with an MLS from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Off the Coast, String Poet, Arroyo Literary Review, The Curator, Adanna, Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine, The Midwest Quarterly, Edison Literary Review, California Quarterly, The Sand Hill Review, and Cider Press Review. Two of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She currently lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey where she is a member of the U.S. 1 Poets’ Cooperative, and since 2015 has been part of the Cool Women Poets critique and performance group, which gives readings in venues throughout New Jersey.