“Notes on Cruising the rest stop off exit 187 at 11:45 pm”
What I love about this poem by Jason B. Crawford is its complexity. The speaker is cruising – looking for sex in a rest stop bathroom. The stakes are relatively low – “The ritual is simple” – if you stop there. But the poem doesn’t. There is real danger, actual danger: “Beware of the attendants, or the officers, or the predators shaped like a soft tongue,” and there is the very real danger of emotion, of the fact that this act (which is “easy”) is maybe tied to something deeper, something haunted and hurting. “What a mess we’ve made of these throats trying to paint straight lines.”
I love a poem that isn’t afraid to get messy, to hold a mirror up to our lives, our choices, our actions which are rarely anything but messy. I love a poem that deals with life’s complexity. I love a poem that lets “the symphony of sinks curtain close themselves into a dry, wanting sky”. It’s a beautiful poem, it’s a sad poem, it makes my heart ache, but it’s also a little sexy, and kind of fun, and that’s complicated, and that’s dangerous, and that’s why I love this poem.
Read the poem here in Issue 10 of Spilled Milk Magazine.
Jason B. Crawford is a black, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as Wellington Street Review, Barren Magazine, The Amistad, and Kissing Dynamite, he is also the Editor in Charge for The Knight’s Library Magazine. His chapbook collection Summertime Fine was a Short List selection for Nightingale & Gale. You can find more of his work at https://www.jasonbcrawford.com/