Sudden Hymn in August by Carlie Hoffman

Everyone’s asleep besides the lovers
who have just returned from the Jeep’s backseat,
shivering with rain. Not wanting night to end yet,
they grab a bottle of gin leftover in the mini fridge
and tiptoe toward the balcony, careful
not to wake the dark figures snoring gently
on the rug. By now they’ve already drunk
enough beer to restlessly consider the amount of stars
it would take to chart the shape of West Virginia,
that yellow-blurred state he will leave her for,
though neither of them knows this.
They are young enough to believe
that stars and sex are the terms of salvation.
It’s raining heavier and for a long time they sit in plastic chairs
overlooking the small, rectangular slab of motel pool,
observing the thick drops dissolve inside it.
It is so typical to fall intent on becoming
the thing that is outlined. Perhaps this is why
they came here in the first place:
some inherent longing for a windfull of salt
and the ocean that is never quite done with itself.
And they don’t need to be finished either,
not with the rain that is blowing onto them, too,
hitting the roof like a pile of the evening’s cans
dumped into the trash. They don’t have to agree
there is something spectacular or whole that is coming
from any of this, only that they are here.

Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska, forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2021. She is the recipient of a 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. Her poems have been published in Bennington Review, Boston Review, North American Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly and elsewhere, and she has been listed as one of Narrative Magazine’s “30 Below 30” poets. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Purchase College, SUNY and also teaches writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University.