27 August 2019: This poem has sat in my inbox for over three months. That happens sometimes with a poem-of-the-day email in which the poem moves me, but I am not sure what to do with it. I leave it there, re-reading it every once in a while. And sometimes, finally, I post it here.
I re-read this one when I was Massachusetts this summer, traveling and thinking about how lonely it could be. I also thought about those words of pseudo-encouragement on the box: "Life is hard / not unbeatable."
It also seems worth sharing what the poet said about it, included in the email: “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 20 years since my mother’s death, is an ongoing and, in some ways, ever-changing journey.”
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