Poetry by Adrian Slonaker

New Year's Eve in Iowa with a Biker                                                                                    

My hands paw your worn leather jacket
and your Rasputin beard.
Since spying you at the Price Chopper
purchasing frozen samosas,
I've pledged to nuzzle your
razorburn-blotched neck
before you and your bored old lady
blast out of Urbandale
on your choppers through the mundane chill
of Merle Hay Road.

​


Postcolonial Paramour

Your wood-hued wolf eyes,
your sheltering shoulders of Empire,
your commanding tones subduing me,
discussing lava lamps over tikka masala.
We swayed to the rhythm of an oscillating fan,
licking lassi from lips,
while I pondered a prayer of thanks.

I listened to you with the gentleness of bumblebee fur;
you lay into your neuroses like fists upon pizza dough.
When you finished, I donned your clothes,
not caring that they didn't fit.

​


Freshman-Year Redux

The non-judgmental greenery behind
the greedy entrepreneur's
neo-Romanesque church
was a sanctuary for the philosophy student
who pronounced century-old suspense
by Stoker and LeFanu
with a tongue, lips and throat
that had tasted vegan cheese,
but never cock or clit.

In an intellectual ghetto,
where minds pounce on calculus and Kant
just as leopards leap at gazelles,
Christian craved carnality.
He questioned his queerness in quadrangles
and traced names of non-existent lovers
in sloppy Serbian Cyrillic letters
on a dusty library window.
The university still stands;
the dust is still scoring sneezes.
Maybe he'll return in triumph
if he ever got laid.

​


I Live in a Hotel 

I live in a hotel
that's slumming it as a motel.
It resounds with the rap-tap-tap of housekeeping
and the splashes of a swanky swimming pool,
just like in Beverly Hills.
The current incarnation
of Roger Miller's King of the Road, I've inhabited hotels
in Chicago and Seattle and Des Moines and
Lexington and Birmingham and Houston and Portland and
Pasadena.

I'm proud to have overcome lease-slavery, and, if
companionship is craved,
the personnel are perpetually peppy.
On Thanksgiving and Christmas,
I make the most of movie marathons and
pesto pizzas from places that play up to
the freaks of the festival season,
pleased not to be plagued by the peskiness of family disputes.
I can enter the New Year peeking into the communal garbage can and
considering whether the condom wrappers,
crushed Coors cans and empty packs of Camels
belonged to the same unseen, unknown neighbors.

And when I can no longer ignore my itchy feet or the aggregation of
ghostly vibes bequeathed by quondam guests, I grab my suitcase and
go toward the greener pastures of
another hotel.  

​

BIO: Adrian Slonaker works as a copywriter and copy editor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with interests that include vegetarian cooking, wrestling, and 1960s pop music. Adrian's poetry has appeared in Red Weather, Red Fez, ZiN Daily Archive, The Remembered Arts Journal, Literary Yard, and others.

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