The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper —
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

Franz Wright

In the dream with the stillborn ghost, 

the chicken never crosses the road. 
I’m trying to get out of my mother’s car 
but it’s parked too close to my father’s truck; 
I’m left with one foot pinned by the door. 
In the dream you’ve heard this all before. 
I lick your teeth; each one turns over 
out of order, spells oh, spells oh I, 
spells other side. 

for the Motel Astra


The desolation without season, summer
somehow heightens it, Route 1’s course from Maine
to Florida Interstate-strangled, this narrow
stretch in Virginia wasted as a riverbed
drought-hushed. Remains of gas stations, diners,
and motels litter it, and here, July, long
month that had meant their greatest thriving,
offers itself again to the decades’ abandonment.

The motel signs, once neon sculptures
of lyric light and promise, still advertise
darkly what was: Corona, Radiant,
Starlight, Aurora, places named for skybound
destinations someone dreamed up to lure those
on their way to or from the ocean,
to or from the mundane everyday,
the heat, at least, for a time — a night — escapable.

A place or two still rent by the season
to migrant workers following a harvest,
tobacco, peanuts, soybeans — or the paving
of other roads. But most have fallen beyond use,
windows paneless, still-numbered doors ajar,
anything worth salvage hauled out piecemeal,
the only inhabitants small birds, black snakes,
wasps, and vines, cavity-seekers, their shadows.

From here, when the Interstate stalls, the horizon glows
past sunset — the convergence of brakelights and lowbeams
rising with the smell of sour crude oil and tar: jaundiced-rose
fuming exhaust cast off as though from lava flow, slow-
certain rage. And when it is in motion, the sound
of shifting gears and engine braking becomes
that of a storm, never quite formed,
its forming ceaseless, thunder dry, impotent.

The Astra lingers on as a flea market
and fruit stand, as though in a demented dream
of itself, some rooms filled with the detritus
of what didn’t sell at auction, some with fresher
produce: watermelons, tomatoes,
cantaloupes, peaches warm to the touch.
 
The sign at the open gate of the swimming pool
warns no lifeguard, the risk yours. The owner
might have drained it, or let it drain itself,
evaporate from precious clarity
to airless pond before this measured void,
the diving board a dull, more deadly blade.

On the concrete floor of the pool, the years’ collection
of leaf rot, dust, rainfall and frost, the crickets
and toads that fell into and then could not
escape it — have recomposed to form
the barest layer of soil. Strict plot, unruly,
vagrant narrative. The poorest, most ordinary
volunteer, take shallow root, fireflies seeding
sunken air.  The road took with it the unreachable

looming, mirage, vivid shimmering
above fresh blacktop never water at all,
unattainable refraction, the vision
disappearing quick as the light, sweet
crude we used to chase it — irresistible,
that fleet mirror of what was sky.

Claudia Emerson

Heat exists as energy in transit,
something spontaneous, volatile, elementary,
“something which may be transferred from one body
to another” (James Clerk Maxwell, “Theory of Heat”).

Notice how it moves from an object with a high
temperature to an object with a lower one,
a process of thermal contact, the sun
burning through the coldest morning sky.

Heat increases and flows across boundaries.
It is ancient, fluctuating, vibrational,
like these summer days that are so combustible
and these nights when stars enlighten the skies.

I remember the time you touched me near the stove
and the flames sparked in my body, love.

Edward Hirsch

The question was authenticity: silver Indian
bracelet, turquoise beads. You said, “Sterling,
925.” I said, “Nickel, cannot find the stamp,”
and we left the pawnshop’s dim arcade, your face
transparent before watches in the window’s glass.

On Queen’s West: leather jackets in a store called
“Skin and Bone,” jeweled phoenixes that rose
straight from my high school feathered roach-clip
days. Parallel wall mirrors sent soap-stone beavers
and raw-hide drums off in rows.

You wanted one small drop of blue for your
right ear. The cost: splitting a pair. An infant
squawked and sucked a fist in the back room,
his mother stitching moose-skin, surrounded
by fur. You said: “My old lover would like this,

she collected pelts.” I looked at the tied
feet and noses—bear, bobcat, minx,
deer, cow. Twenty skunk-tails in a barrel.
I thought of zooaphilia: woman who married
a bear, a frog, a swan, who fed a cobra milk
and then fell in love. Or the man who married
a horse, a goat, a bird he held to his chest
and carried everywhere. I thought of each pelt
as you, your skin. Remembered the man
who stoned two dogs to death and hung them
in a tree. His only cure: to marry the dog’s
sister in an elaborate ceremony, a feast
for a thousand guests. I thought about
the difference, a dog in a white dress.

That night you worried about my carrying on—
crying, raccoon eyes, my leaps between our hotel beds then
catatonia, unable to sleep in that tower of 500 rooms,
all with the same portrait above the bed—a naked
beauty cavorting against a furred beast; he a psychedelic
square of hair, she, S-shaped, pale, sleek. I prayed
our marriage would ward off bad omens, dreamt
of cages, stroked your hair. I couldn’t tell whose skin
was whose. I dreamed I was your animal. Let me
be your animal. But then I woke and found our bodies
hairless in the mollusk-colored room.

Sarah Messer