by Susana H. Case
Black and white photographs line the
corridors: here, a roadster, with a glamorous
woman checking her face in the rear view;
another inhales a candelabra of eight cigarettes.
Who are these people?
Am I supposed to know? Perhaps I’m too
unmoored to know. Lost child, once
misplaced at Macy’s, where I had been led
to believe babies came from. Now,
even my distracted mother in her
permanent wave is gone. Everyone is gone,
Grace Kelly, gone, but her I recognize,
nonetheless, near the elevator, her
sac à dépêches, handbag, hiding her
pregnancy from the paparazzi,
some standing partly out of frame.
I find my way to my room by looking for
the picture of the roadster. This hotel
is a station for those in transit. And I’d be
moving on too, if I knew where to find you.
Susana H. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology. Author of several chapbooks, her Slapering Hol Press chapbook, The Scottish Café, was published in a dual-language version, Kawiarnia Szkocka, by Poland’s Opole University Press. She is the author of four full-length collections, including Elvis Presley’s Hips & Mick Jagger’s Lips (Anaphora Literary Press), and, most recently, 4 Rms w Vu (Mayapple Press). Please visit her online at: http://iris.nyit.edu/~shcase/.
Hawaii Pacific Review 