Lit-zine
JU
The Man Who Woke Up in the Same Motel Room for Seventeen Years
ANNE LAWRENCE
Anne Lawrence is a former student of Modern Languages at Cardiff University, and a recent Open University Graduate in English Literature. In the last couple of years, her poetry has been published in several magazines, including 'Orbis'. Her poem, 'Spring Wedding' was Highly Commended in the 2013 Sentinel Poetry Prize competition. Married with three children, she lives and works in Northumberland. An occasional Tweeter: @shrewdbanana
His door is always tricky, reluctant
to open, its weight
a reassurance, trying to press him back inside
his room.
Familiar corridors
vanish down perspective lines - devouring him, licking out
their long eternal passage
with alien doors and hidden faces,
encapsulating a liminal journey
with no heroes and no names.
Static sings accompaniment; his ears buzz hollow in a syncopation of lost time.
Thin walls, patterned with unlikely flowers, press onwards to the front desk.
A nod of the head and he straightens
a perfectly imagined hat
(no one wears them now)
remembers to smile,
exits stage left.
Car park signs blink with rain
in a purple light passing
for dawn outside.
Behind him, shadows close
on the empty room,
the unmade bed, the tracks of steam
on still wet tiles.
The cold, dark sense of
déjà vu
always takes
him
by surprise.
Secret Trees
In the forest we wear green.
We blend in. We don’t wish to feel abroad
like strangers in a strange land.
And our tongues give us pause
as if we return from Troy, or Ancient Rome,
or Mars. Our garments speak instead for us.
So our language, like a lost gift or a dangerous wager,
is kindly returned with politeness:
an obligation we can’t afford.
The well-balanced axe in the cool hand,
a quiver of arrows honed from secret trees
and fletched with gentle harness-
these are all we need.