Durango Cold
By John M. Anderson


After a hard night
you follow the attendant down the street-dark hall
to the table where I’m lying.

He takes a sharp breath
like a knife into his nostril and lifts
the sheet. You see

the light of an all-night café
in Durango, Colorado, in Christmas week,
that electric light in the deep snow

pre-dawn glow. Dozens of hours
later you’ll rest, a heron exhausted
by the flag’s crack and rigging’s moan,

asleep, wing up in the sand.

John M. Anderson teaches at Boston College. He has work just out in Fugue, Rosebud, Argestes, The Carolina Quarterly, The Big Ugly, and South Dakota Review among others; he was nominated by The Aurorean for a 2007 Pushcart Prize. His chapbook Dictionary Quilt (Pudding House, 2007), is about the weird dream landscapes of the American southwest. He is working on a book called “Old Masters, Iraq War Edition.”

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