A WELL-KEPT, CHEAP MOTEL

By: Murray Silverstein

The peeling white bark of a sun-struck birch.

The no-mow grass

bent with rain. The wind muffling the whine

of cars on the freeway but not the cawing of the crow.

What is, in March, the peeling, the bending,

the cawing, the flow—

if words are, they are

in addition to, over and above.

Underscoring, maybe; understating always.

Every day I place a bet on is and lose—

why is there no learning here?

But when they fit, the words, I feel like a man

who’s been up for days, believing he’s found

in the heart of it all, a moment that is a place,

not so much a home as a well-kept, cheap motel

with a sign flashing VACANCY.

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Murray Silverstein has been published in Sunspot Lit, RATTLE, Brief Wilderness, The Brooklyn Review, Cape Rock Poetry, Euphony Journal, Midwest Quarterly, Spillway, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, The Hollins Critic, ZYZZYVA, California Quarterly, El Portal Literary Journal, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, Front Range Review, Louisiana Literature, The MacGuffin, The Meadow, Pembroke Magazine, Pennsylvania English, Plainsongs, Sweet Tree Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, and The Courtship of Winds, among others. He has authored two books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007), the latter of which received the Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal for Poetry in 2006. Silverstein is the senior editor of the anthology America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), winner of the Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal for Anthologies in 2017. All were published by Sixteen Rivers Press. A retired architect, Silverstein also...co-authored four books about architecture, including A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press) and Patterns of Home (The Taunton Press). He holds a master’s degree in architecture.