Four Poems

City of Motels

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_4/Mcbride1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

In the neighboring room
is a reel to reel, looping
a recording from some SoHo party
circa 1968.

Jaundiced Polaroids drift like leaves
through thick-carpeted hallways—

everywhere, these
people-echoes.

After it all
what isn’t memory?

At midnight
a desk clerk calls, saying
“‘You’ stands for
‘I want myself back.’”

The ice machine
mumbles its slurred Latin

and tonight
I am the littlest prison.

I remember your hair smelled like milk.

I remember when it snowed
it snowed only on your face.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_4/Mcbride2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

On a taupe chair
with no discernable edges

you watch clouds
clot into bruises

contemplate a 1992 lost
to rewinding VHS tapes.

All you ever wanted
was a box
big enough to hide in.

The soap is tiny
and shaped
like various waterfowl;

the telephone ringing
in the other room
will be your only remainder.

Most every surface is pasted over
with curling wallpaper
sutured awkwardly by Scotch tape.

Each year, we tear a sheet
from the Yellow Pages
and whoever’s name’s longest
is president.

Our trees are made mostly
from Styrofoam
and wind whittles them
to pellets in days.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_4/Mcbride3.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

Skeletons of birds
hang still in the sky.

The clouds have gone all moldy.

Someone forgot to change
the bulb in the moon

so it makes a clicking noise
that keeps you from sleep.

You speak your name
into a sheet of cellophane

and hold the ball of it
in the palm of the palm of your hand.