Since we looked at each other and couldn’t
make much of anything.
How are we ever supposed to
with hands unable to hold more than
our given fields—mine fence-staked,
yours of too many beautiful, fallow shades.
We’re in the motel lobby because
I refuse to sleep in the snow-covered
campground. Do you remember
that afternoon we hardboiled
eggs over a twig fire, laid in the dust
by the road, asleep as fast
as a freeze. Do you remember when
we looked at the trees and one looked
back with a face like a wolf—god we laughed
when we built too big a fire, had to throw
the river on it, ran into the river death-lean
and drinking dark liquor because we’d been told
to by too many. What I remember now is how
jumpy you get around snakes. Do you remember
that kid who rung one right
out of the spring by its neck—
held it up like a child—his sad
strength tense in his temple—or when
that truckdriver asked if I could fix
the tangled wires in his dash and I did,
jumped right in the cab like someone who
had never been hit and you told me later
your knife wasn’t in your pocket
that all you had on you was one of those
hard boiled eggs, that if he tried anything
you’d’ve hocked it right into his eye. We stand
there in the motel lobby and I just can’t quite
forget the gravel in the road on those spring
evenings, ordinary evenings, when my hands
went dust-black from playing ball in the street
as you tried to forget who you were,
what you loved. We are in the motel
lobby, and it’s gotten late as I look across
the street at the white glare of the Subway
dining room like some eternal flame of this
estranged now—and behind the motel counter
the woman says a price we can’t pay, and after
a pause, says again, How about the trucker rate. Half off.
And that night we sleep okay.
Tor Strand is a Fishtrap Fellow and recipient of the Mari Sandoz Emerging Writer award. He was also selected as the 2023 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Tor’s poetry and essays have been published in the Colorado Review, Salt Hill Journal, Fugue, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University. Find more work at torstrand.org
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