Jeffrey Franklin

EXCITEMENT OF GETTING A ROOM WITH A MINIBAR

If you were Gidget or Gigi or Glorianne from Kansas,
you might kick both feet up behind like a miniature pony,
sending the pleated skirt too high, squeal and run
to bounce on the bed with flipped cockroach legs.

But instead you are tired after the happy disaster, the bad
fantasy, the aging family members and mirror phobia,
not to mention the failed restaurant. This isn’t Daytona
Bike Week, nor your first time in Paris, and you are

all too aware what they charge for those dinky bottles.
No, you’ve brought your own fifth, picked up
at Dino’s Liquor and Car Wash before you checked in.
Today was not the day your happy childhood predicted.

You are sad with a sadness only a single room matches.
This is your reward, this view of curtained windows
exactly like yours, these industrially sanitized towels,
this generic solitude… You slip off your shoes

and click on the scrolling menu of tonight’s movies:
a meteor the size of Cleveland, or sadistic murder
justifies the most thorough revenge ever quenched.
Things are looking up. You amble over to the minibar,

lift the white fluted paper cap from the cafeteria
and crack your bottle of Sky. For just one moment,
your heart soars: there, in the plastic bucket,
still smoking with cold, perfect lozenges of ice.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
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