At a Days Inn in Barstow, California
It’s dusk on a Tuesday in June. A hot wind
bears down and east. In my room, a stranger’s
hairclip lies like a gilded insect beside the sink.
Hours later, it’s still dusk; it will be dusk all night.
Last month, I cut the masking tape from a box my mother left
my sister and me. On the lid, she wrote, Life is hard, not
unbeatable. If I can do it, darlings, so can you. 2 am. A rosy dark
dusting the window, the heat a ladder into sleep.
Copyright © 2019 by Chloe Honum. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets
“This poem is from a series I’ve been working on of poems set in motels across America. My hope in these poems is to explore questions of travel, distance, intimacy, and connection when one is passing through a place in the vast American landscape. This poem is also about grief, particularly the grief of losing a loved one to suicide, which in my experience, over twenty years since my mother’s death, is an ongoing and, in some ways, ever-changing journey.”
—Chloe Honum
Chloe Honum
Chloe Honum is the author of The Lantern Room (Tupelo Press, 2022), Then Winter (Bull City Press, 2017), and The Tulip-Flame (Cleveland State University Press, 2014).