back to
poetry
index

Coming In Out of the Rain Off Highway 66
by Earl Coleman

We’re peering half-across a murky end-room in a Super 8 Motel, the hissing neon leaking orange on the rain-blotched shadowed ceiling, traffic hissing on the gash of highway slicing past the Getty gas pump, room dark, lights off like she said she wanted it. She’s half-stripped now, hands unfocused on her bra hook and the room as vacant to her as the sign when we drove up, as though we aren’t really here, me in rained-on dungarees, the lumpy cushions sprung, not really sure how this is working out.

What we can see is not the wallpaper design, the bedspread’s shabbiness, the peeled veneer, the castor missing from the Naugahyde and metal corner seat outside the boxed-in john. What we can see is always hazy, shifting shape, not with our head and eyes in sync, but fogged up with our fear or lust, in dingy bars with twenty watts of light, within the steamy fog of our own waking dream, not close enough, just inches off to see things straight, as we can barely see her breasts that sag without the bra, her hands outstretched and blind as if in silent plea, the substance of her outlined in the darkened room, the Magic Fingers waiting if we wanted that.