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Hotel Eidetic Come, bring us to this hovel. Somewhere the groom enters the bride. Somewhere today said something hopeful about fixity. Bath towel, bible, room key, and if it all runs to nothing, my evidentiary? Women aren’t inhabited figuratively. Say stain and come to bed, say bruise and kneel instead, say rough. Let fall your horrible pleasure. Killed, the spider curls to galaxy. Outside, occlusion/snow/a localized stifling/the day bereft. And cry these dreadful summoners grace? This page is full of theft. Lucida, obscura, snow. Battery of wind/six hours till dawn/long ellipsis/hand restlessÏonanistic night & nothing any fool can do. Stained I do not know if you are sleeping. To make a fetish to suffice: exhausting. Bottle seeds, room keys, wings of things I’ve sworn to never hurt yet when I sleep there’s something maned there. Roar. A pubic hair for my locket, a snowstorm for my doorÏmy dears, I’ve lost too much. Let pink be the color of friction. Let haunting be the sum of touch. Something about under, something about hand: for days my nerves on end. The word a room we rent to write I found a wood with thorny boughs, the chemical-bright and the chemical-dark, plus these seedpods that strain and spend in dark, forest if left as desire is never left (at rest). What clatter, this. Forgive my clumsy genuflect. The way the adjective signals terror of the noun, adornment terror of the body: in words, like weeds, I’ll wrap you o’er. The word a rented room and there we do not eat our hearts alone. In words like weeds I’ll lay you down.
Kerri Webster received her MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where she was a Lilly Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Pleiades, Volt, and elsewhere. Originally published in the October/November 2002 issue of Boston Review |
