Poetry
1 min
Jaundiced Travel Poems
Valerie Hotchkiss
DC
It's always too hot
When I visit DC
Squinting at the fierce sun
Dragging my feet from
Museum to Museum
Walking as if on the bottom
Of a glass of warm water
Admiring our treasures
And cursing our climate.
Dallas Salon
Ladies who have their hair done here
Are so chipper, so thin, so blond, so anxious
They are leading lives of quiet desperation
Luckily, they have never heard of Thoreau.
Hometown
Sitting in a restaurant
Trying not to catch her eye.
I know her from somewhere.
Hope she can't remember either.
Nashville Nail Shop
No one fully understands.
We move our feet
To where they point
Smiles, but no
Communication beyond cuticles.
New York, Yale Club
The Yale Club Library holds
Only two works by H.G. Wells
And none by William Maxwell.
I'm afraid to look for Fitzgerald,
Whose Nick once studied at these tables.
Transatlantic
I slept.
I know I dreamed,
So I assume I slept.
My lower back
Thinks otherwise,
Twisted, not rested.
Berlin
Along construction pathways,
Skirting past gorgeous buildings
Swathed in mesh-covered scaffolds.
One day—man weist nicht wann—
This city will rival Paris.
Oxford
Tall, thin, privileged professor
Orders a coffee, third in the queue
Takes the first made and walks out the door,
Head in the air, along with his nose.
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