the lightless swooping
wire-lettered neon
sign reads ‘no vacancy’
wait and see
she says as she drives away,
leaving shards of glass
beneath streetlight glow
in the empty carpark.
I scoop the dead leaves
from the pool between us—
sleep in other people’s sheets,
dry myself with their scratchy towels.
The white noise from the wall-mounted
flatscreen TV
fills the halls,
the space between us.
And I pick up the broken glass—
careful not to cut myself.
Naomi Zander is a writer and English and Literature teacher based in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). With 25 years’ teaching experience, they studied creative writing at the Queensland University of Technology and they write short absurdist fiction, long-form realist prose, and poetry exploring grief, memory, and the persistence of the past, often through motifs of decay and the natural world.