The Night Before We Moved into the Motel

A black bear is rummaging through garbage

ten feet from an open window in the rental cabin.

I believe the bear is female like the ones I saw in films

during fourth period biology about the black bears

of Smoky Mountain National Park in washed out

color images—friendly bears accepting scraps of KFC

from motorists touring the park, escaping their own

daily confines, gray sedans with cracked-open windows,

black bears lapping through the gap with sticky tongues,

dads clicking off polaroid images, nervous moms forcing

smiles next to the bear in frame—waving away the boy

in the backseat poking at the animal click, quick, hurry

before she bites.

My parents took me to the Smokies in their Triumph Spitfire.

Still an infant, wedged between them in an empty baby-bath,

dad swerved through bear-infested roads while mom flung poultry

parts at the omnivores—a fragment of memory I scrounged

together through years of sniffing through what-we-don’t-want-

to-remember—look at her out there—a beast-barely-sated

on bits of lemon-pepper-chicken and the last warm drops

of a sensible Chardonnay. I watch her through the night,

carrying what is left to be picked into the darkness beyond

the road named something-I-won’t-remember.

This poem first appeared in “The Phoenix Literary Journal” Issue 65