Hotel Eden
by Anita Olivia Koester
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You are still youthful, the women in my life remind me after my divorce.
Rejuvenation is not only a word for skincare products. There is still time to renovate. You’ve had enough of suffocation, enough of walls, of pillars and monoliths. He never spoke about anything, old aluminum rattled in his mouth. The voice of that ancient creature within us, when I picture it, is curved like an amplifier. Listen with me, as the soft mew builds into a bellow. Blow out the walls to let the outside world trespass. Let lizards glide in the living room, lady bugs loiter on terracotta lips. Let the roof be removed by the banner-laden palomas. Let the sheep discard their fleeces, follow the foxes to a moonlight feast. Let the house become a hotel. Eve, the proprietress. Adam, a hole burnt in photos. Still, the neighbors will call you a cat-lady, only a woman is never given nine lives. Only one. Goethe might have said— the individual has to be ruined again, but he was talking of men. Men were always talking of men. |
Anita Olivia Koester is a Chicago poet and author of four chapbooks including Apples or Pomegranates (Porkbelly Press), Marco Polo (Hermeneutic Chaos Press), and Arrow Songs which won Paper Nautilus’ Vella Contest. Her poems have been nominated for Best New Poets and Pushcart Prizes, and won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, So to Speak’s Annual Poetry Contest, Midwestern Gothic’s Lake Prize in Poetry, amongst others. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in CALYX Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Vinyl, Phoebe Journal and elsewhere. She is currently an associate poetry editor at Green Mountains Review, and founder of Fork & Page. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and PLAYA. Her website is- www.anitaoliviakoester.com and she tweets @anitaokoester