Motels
Published in Maudlin House
February 2022
Motels are made for poets. Or maybe they’re the result of a world without them. Creviced streams collecting leaves and remnants of gas station binges. Long crumbling stretches slicing through memories of a natural world. Staring out the window, eyes reeling my heartbeat into another flat roof with too many doors. And another. And another. The pits in my chest jerk and start to crack open, making way for the baby born here that shouldn’t have been born here. Small shells cupped to the ground, revealing something beautiful and grotesque—the lingering taste of citrus in cardboard, sticky residue on fingers, and pastries that were never quite fresh and never quite stale. Opening to concrete walls containing that which cannot be contained, mired by cheap landscape portraits adorning broken shrines, and the alchemy of refreshing stale ash with fire. These spaces pass as slices of film, reeling me back into the moments when this was all a dream… and back to the moment when it wasn’t.
