Miles Waggener

Hotel Fray Marcos

                

                Nogales, Mexico 1974 

Wait here, boy—

And just like that,

My father was gone.

With the slamming of a metal grate 

The room we had just stepped from,

Smelling of hair oil, cigar, 

Something impossibly sweet,

Had slipped into the floor

With my father inside,

Leaving a dusty cavern of wires, 

The uncoiling hiss 

Behind a brass cage

Of a black lizard’s tail

That would coil up again

To bring back 

The elevator 

Empty. How long alone 

In the green hallway

Of numbered doors 

I waited, who can say—

 

Later, I was told to sleep,

But having dozed in the truck as we

 

Drove south all night to cross the border,

I couldn’t close my eyes,

And the only light in that 

Tenebrific room

Was his ankle, bone-white,

Emerging from beneath the blanket. 

For the last time in our lives

I watched my father’s body as he slept

And listened to the lizard’s tail  

Coil and uncoil in its cage.

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Image by Clément Proust from Pexels

Miles Waggener is the author of four volumes of poetry: Phoenix Suites, Sky Harbor, Desert Center, and most recently Superstition Freeway, published by The Word Works of Washington DC. He has been the recipient of The Washington Prize as well as individual grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Nebraska Arts Council. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as The Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Cutbank, Gulfcoast, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Nebraska Omaha.

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