Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Hotel Orpheus
Rain, Eurydice, more rain.
It seems these mountains are married
to cold, damp clouds. I’ve known
no sun here, where you are
not. I sit by this window
and peel the skin from a pear.
Darling, I needed to see you
and now I see rain, hotel porn.
Somebody sent chrysanthemums,
some roses, an orchid. They smell
nothing like you. My nose is wasted
on onions and cilantro’s summer noise.
I won’t cry any more. I won’t wake
in the middle of the night and reach
for the phone to call you.
This rain, how it seems to seethe
like water hissing from the lips
of the kettle, begging one more dance
with Darjeeling. I watch the news
of India, a 70-year-old couple killed
in their hotel room. Didn’t Dickinson say
the world was made for lovers?
Well, she died alone and this pear
tastes like salt. O little town
with your shut-down steel factories,
build me a ship, there is a river
I need to cross with waters so dark
dawn looks like night and my own name
is sung on the waves like a curse.
Jason Myers grew up in Maryland, graduated from Bennington College, received his MFA from New York University, then drifted south. He now lives in Atlanta, where he is FTE Fellow at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, AGNI, Indiana Review, The Paris Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. (updated 5/2010)