Hotel

Carl Adamshick’s first book received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. His most recent collection, Birches was published by Four Way Books in 2019. He writes an on-going article on etymology for the quarterly Kitchen Table called “A Word from the Kitchen.” He lives in Portland, Oregon.

After the Election
I receive a letter from the future.
It assures me everything
will be fine, that you and I
will share a meal with friends,
that one of us will open a book,
read a soft passage concerned
with the body and we will all,
somehow, feel a little closer.
I crawl back beneath blankets.
Nothing disappears or goes away.
Clouds under the light rally.
I predict heavy rain in the headlights
of parked cars, the day as it is—
a record stuck in its ending.
Alone in the bed’s thick shadow
I draft a truce with the world
that will forever remain unread
and unsigned. Silence reflecting
a kind of madness—looking
within the dim corridors of being.
And for what, to see the citizens
of a small city stalled for a moment
at dusk with the pain of certainty
etched on their faces.