Twenty Motels
In the first motel, we'd ditched our parents. In the second, we got caught. After a dozen, I remember a green one, flickering like a stripe on the highway. We blinked and passed. In the fifteenth motel, I slept alone but the bed was crowded with grief. And another, halfway between two borders north and south, three languages and every line transgressed. Each motel the set of a terrible play. The motel with stairs inside, so a hotel really. The small squarish bed we laughed about and described as European, and the sketch I made of you on the bus. The motel just far enough away. Where the ice from the plastic bucket turned to runnels along our skin. The one with a pool, at which all the lights ached and I existed as a cabinet amid a family. My sticky hinge. Every circular drive uncanny / familiar / strange, culminating in the handing over of a key. The scent when you enter each room. The odor when you leave it. The perpetual abandon. The abandonment of perpetuity. Each room breathing like the spaces left in a loaded sentence. On each borrowed bed a suspect pillow to which you can only succumb.