The Gotham Hotel

                        has twenty-five floors. Its letters hum  
                       to pedestrians in large metal serif.  
                      From Floor 19, you can see offices across  
                     the street, suits dimming their desk lamps.  
                    Like all hotel rooms, this one’s asking you 
                   to cry. You wait until you’ve left the large bed,  
                  the elevator dings open and you’re on West 46th 
                 passing long October coats. Only there, away  
                from the cornerless dark where your lover sleeps,  
               away from the room’s disarming neutrality,  
              can you soften into what’s next. The relief  
             of dropping sad water on pavement used  
            to catching it. How steady the scaffolding.  
           How predictable its right angles. Under them,  
          the curve of your head gains balance.  
         Feathers continue their low pivoting  
        in sudden storm. On Floor 19, your lover’s eyelids  
       and shoulders open, the glass wall bends 
      to his length. Last night, while under it,  
     you could taste plaster, steel, ascension of thighs,  
    their blueprint drawn for reascending. Under him,  
   you understood there’s no safe engineering  
  for this much want. What will you lose, pivoting  
on 10th Ave? If you could tell him no, you wouldn’t. 

Copyright © 2024 by K. Iver. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 18, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“The sentence ‘Like all hotel rooms, this one’s asking you / to cry’ came to me during my stay at The Gotham Hotel. Unable to sleep, I wrote it down as a way of listening to desire, its hopes and warnings. The ‘he’ is trans, and that’s important in a text that highlights building as both a noun and a verb. The number of lines, including the bleeding title, matches the hotel’s twenty-five floors. Exteriors are emphasized as sentence subjects—coats and feathers rather than people and pigeons—in a movement that I hope meets the value of Rimbaud’s ‘derangement of the senses,’ which is how I experience desire.”
—K. Iver