By C.W. Bryan

ABOUT THE PIECE

I wrote this poem after a 13 hour road trip to Iowa. It was for my girlfriend. We were in Iowa for her friend's wedding, and both exhausted from the full day of travel. The hotel was such a welcome reprieve, a necessary break, only for us to have a leak in the ceiling a few hours into our stay. It should have been stressful, but I was struck by the thought that I wouldn't want to go through this situation with anyone else.

Johnston, Iowa September, 2, 2023

For Sarah

I think about the water leaking from the ugly popcorn ceiling of our hotel room in Johnston, Iowa and cannot help but laugh.

The water wasn’t brown, like a mourning dove, nor malicious, like a funeral dirge—it was just water,

that didn’t know where else to go. I think about the paint on the roundabouts right off of I-35, how maladroitly it clung to cracked pavement, think about its dreams of being on a canvas hanging in the Frick, the feeling of confused drivers running their burning tread over its body, instead.

And so these words sit on this page, and I can’t bring myself to think where else they would rather be, so I don’t. I just place them there, and hope that you can navigate them a little better than the water leaking from the ugly popcorn ceiling of our hotel room in Johnston, Iowa.

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ARTIST:

C.W. Bryan

C. W. Bryan is a student at Georgia State University. He lives in Atlanta, GA where he writes poetry, nonfiction and short fiction. He is currently writing his weekly series, Poetry is Plagiarism, with Sam Kilkenny at poetryispretentious.com. His debut chapbook Celine: An Elegy was published with Bottlecap Press in 2023. His work can be found in Beaver Magazine, Door is a Jar Magazine, Eunoia Review, Scavengers and elsewhere.