Elizabeth O’Dell is a writer and thinker who explores the meaning of trauma and self through storytelling and poetry. Her work has been featured in Spartanburg Magazine and Concept, earning the Lykes Award for non-fiction. Elizabeth works as a managing editor while studying creative writing and philosophy at Converse University.
“I write to shape my story, not only to build my future, but to understand my past. Through writing, I can revisit the darkness on my terms, to better understand my own history, what has shaped me, and how I want it to shape me. Writing is an act of revealing but also of becoming–to write where you’ve been is to help you find where you will go. To write who you have been is to write the story of who you will become.”
Home
Ask for my hometown and I’ll say
it’s the soles of my feet—they’ve touched
all the ground I’ve ever walked on.
No city, no house calls me home.
Home is the ones my hands have held,
and the hands that have held me,
hands that have pulled me from the waters,
hands that will clap when I cross the stage.
I can name all the streets I’ve ever lived on,
because memory can hold homes, hold back time,
hold tomorrows that didn’t happen
next to the ones that did. And memory
can change too, if you remember enough times,
bend and shape around itself,
like space folding in, like traveling time.
I ask the soles of my feet if they remember
all the traveling we’ve done. They say
they’ve never been any place but here
where I am, and I am always here,
here on the ground where my feet touch,
here in a home built of memories
and time and tomorrows,
and the hands that I hold,
and the hands that hold me.