Chris Hutchinson

Breakfast at the Armory Hotel in Bozeman, Montana

Somewhere in the future
from inside the antique armoire
inside the Armory Hotel, the future
is looking back at me.

But not before I peer in
at the sequences of switchbacks
and figure eights, the puzzling
tunnels and galleries
of the worm-inscribed
mahogany. 

It looks like someone tried
to write a sonnet
on a roller coaster
with one finger. 

Deciphered and sonified
it is the underground lighthouse
sound of ringing in my ears.

As a figure of speech
that got lost along the way
to the doomsday parade
it is the horizon’s feathery fringe that blinks
when the sky closes its big blue eyes
to sleep. 

As real as the fact of my own birth
as certain as the place / time coordinates
of my final breath

and better 

than any superlative exaltation
it is like frying a quail’s egg
but burning the butter 

like the recurring dream they have up here
in Montana, of lassoing bulls with rope
woven from mulberry silk.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Chris Hutchinson is the author of four previous poetry books, as well as the cult classic auto-fictive verse-novel Jonas in Frames. His next poetry collection, Lost Signal, is forthcoming in Canada with Palimpsest Press in 2025. Chris teaches in the English Department at MacEwan University in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, AB) on Treaty 6 territory.