for the Ramada, a Holiday
Inn or, if I’m feeling fancy,
the Hilton. With turndown
service. Sometimes, it’s a Bed
& Breakfast, where I’d sip
coffee on the porch, turn
pages, and talk to no one
about nothing. But even that
feels too intimate. I want empty
drawers, my things heaped
in a suitcase. A room for me
to leave dirty, crumpled towels
on tile, shoes kicked into the blue
bordering the room. I’d come back
each night to tightly tucked linens,
a lamp left on, little boxes of soap,
fresh—no finger dents, no fossilized
hair. All this magic performed
by someone I don’t have to see,
to thank, their imprint on my life
as permanent as the tracks the vacuum
leaves in the diamond patterned plush.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 13.
Danielle Jones-Pruett is the winner of the 2011 Vella Poetry Prize and the recipient of a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Abject Press, First Inkling, Southern Women’s Review, and others. She works at UpSource and UMass, Boston.
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