Hotel Utah Dream

by Jessica Wickens

A cardboard box holding kittens with folded ears. I think of black tattoo ink rubbed into large swaths of pink shag rug and a timekeeper in a T-shirt, a tall muscled guy delicately plucking a banjo. It calls up exposures, like the old days, how you had to wait for sunset to experience it. I order coffee with a side of guilt of clear skies girlsthe willows are just hanging around today. Stay with me now I’m awake. Stay and remember their freshness, that they smelled not like leaves but like the inside of the mother cat, already licked clean and carried in by a woman in a cowboy hat, her son a bowing, neutral clown, silver pieces glittering across her chest.