Runaway Tire Checks Into Hotel Conference Room
Gregory Crosby
How a message in a bottle becomes a ship in a bottle. How the denial of desire becomes desire for denial. How everyone lives in order not to die. How the mirror reflects you when you're not in the room. How even nirvana is just another moment in the block universe, that infinite, fat dumb brick. What was that noise? The headline read, Runaway Tire Checks Into Hotel Conference Room. Was that it? What you were waiting for? Thankfully, no one was injured. How every conference room closes the door & meets with itself. How truth is a rupture in the mundane. How the rupture itself is mundane. How you laugh, & shake your head, & shake your moneymaker, & slowly forget. How that tire, freed from the wheel, became a story, a legend, a myth. How the water cooler keeps its secrets, in heavy bottles, in the empties, full of light.
Gregory Crosby is the author of the chapbook Spooky Action at a Distance (2014, The Operating System); his poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Court Green, Epiphany, Copper Nickel, Leveler, Sink Review, Ping Pong, & Rattle. In 2002, as a poetry consultant to the City of Las Vegas, he was instrumental in the creation of the Lewis Avenue Poets Bridge, a public art project in downtown Las Vegas. His dedicatory poem for the project, “The Long Shot,” was subsequently reproduced in bronze and installed in the park, and was included in the 2008 anthology Literary Nevada: Writings from the Silver State (University of Nevada Press). He is co-editor of the online poetry journal Lyre Lyre and currently teaches creative writing at Lehman College, City University of New York.