So I had a fairly peripatetic youth.
I was born in Tucson, and then I moved everywhere else.
And now I'm back here.
But part of that lifestyle was that you spend a lot of time
in hotels, and especially motels.
And I was always haunted when I would open the bedside table
and discover a bible in there that had been placed
by none other than the Gideons.
And it struck me as this beautifully romantic ideal,
that there's this army of Gideons out there,
just depositing bibles in the motel bedsides of the world.
What a thankless job.
So this is for them, if they're out there,
which they probably are.
"Ghost of Motel Six."
"If this boy you inhabit is a hotel,
its neon needles the alphabet lightly.
Bibles loam unopened in the boredom
of bedside tables, patient little loaves of leather,
black in their theaters of compressed sleep.
In each room of each lung, silence
swells like a syndicate of ants.
The ghost unfurls from the television like a flower.
The bathroom window is broken.
The wind asking questions, asking
you to come outside to see what it has against you."