Zanni Schauffler Motel Room Outside snow and inside a tree of a girl. She's thin but not sad. She is glad to be alone and wants to know what she looks like so sits on the end of bed across from the mirror. She balances an ashtray on her knee and smokes which she doesn't normally do. She tries not to catch her own eye Then she takes off her t-shirt and smokes that way. She stands and turns a bit crossing a bare arm across her stomach above where her brown pants slouch down and sees her sneakers poking out from her pant cuffs. She thinks she should get some new clothes. She has grown very thin. She is glad to be alone. She wants to see what people see when she's not looking. The One and Only Camel in Vermont Who was even paying attention to direction? It mattered little. Only, we'd been around people for days and it would have been nice to know where New Hampshire was. People—their manners and camouflage. Their bustling in and out of swinging doors, their nagging mosquito bites and trips to the puddle that served as a lake. I suppose you can't deny any animal a taste for low mountains and adirondack chairs. But this landscape, more foreign to this stalwart bactrian than me? I'd have liked to have brought him an olive if that is in fact something camels like to eat. I'd have held my palm flat and smelled his ears. I'd simply like to have known what he was thinking standing out there in the barnyard among all the cows. And who knew what we were thinking, other than it was a pleasing sight to see him there. What We Come Back To The furniture in this poem is animals, tea, a face erased. Declensions of light, leaves, something in the infinitive. Blood, and water in glass. Seconds. The invisibility of things changing. Feet. Cages. Eruptions. Bodies in snowfields. A single piece of falling snow. I used to wish to stay the same forever. Put a giraffe in a snowfield, fill the teacup with blood. Serrate leaves then smooth their edges. Draw a caged foot. Make the body ugly in light. Focus a blurred moment and it's still a moment. This is your house. Cars drive up the road. about Zanni Schauffler