Cincinnati Review

I am sleeping when the pain starts, dreaming of full hospitals and empty classrooms, a dark tunnel, dates on a computer screen, a diminishing roster of students, dead links, a riot of wildflowers—yellow to orange to code red—a superbloom of fires. My body jerks. My eyes open in the dark, and I am sucking air. …

Piya has just turned thirty. She works in her family’s hotel. Tonight she will become pregnant. In twenty-some weeks, she will lose the baby, and the state of Indiana will sentence her to twenty years in prison for feticide. One year for every week. But for now, it is early on Tuesday, and on Tuesdays …

There’s nothing much wrong with the Bridgeway Motor Court. The carpet in Coleman’s room is dappled with burn marks, and the exterior wall, the one with the windows, has these psychedelic zigzags at the bottom, like somebody’s kid was left to run their crayons back and forth over the same spot, rubbing them down to the nubs. It’s cheap, though, the motel, and there aren’t any bugs.

Marcus Donaldson’s poem is akin to the song that you stop everything to dance to when it comes on in the club.

This prose poem name-drops brands in a way that seems to extol consumer spending—until a final turn.

In this story told in the imperative second-person point of view, reading is literally ingesting words and images.