“Wide Awake in an Empty Motel” by Jason M. Thornberry

Jason M. Thornberry’s work appears in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Soundings East, Harbor Review, The Antonym, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Broadkill Review, and elsewhere. His work examines family, disability, and social justice. Jason holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University.

Jason M. Thornberry’s fiction has been previously featured in the Spring 2020 Issue of In Parentheses.

Photography by P. M. Chatelain

Wide Awake in an Empty Motel

Into December night, I drag a
Suitcase full of unopened presents
Over scars in the broken road.

Fugitive from drunken wrath, I
Find an empty motel beside
A teeming freeway.

Eleven-hundred miles from home is
A stiff bed with stiffer sheets. Scuffed
suitcase against the wall.

Heart pounding, I peel the curtain
Peering into the vacant,
Bewildering dark.

Where is the moon? Looming in its
Place, a glittering Denny’s sign
Beckons. And so,

With a cup of coffee, in a
Booth by the door, I hold my
Journal tight, and I struggle to

Keep the senseless December night at
Bay. If I capture it on the page,
Can I turn my back on it?

Returning at last to my room,
I pull the curtains together,
Searching in crevices and corners

For elusive sleep, your voice
Still echoing like broken glass.

From the Editor:

We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.

Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?

The idea for this magazine stems from a simple conversation regarding the aforementioned question, which drew out the need to identify our generation’s place in literary history.

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In Parentheses Magazine (Volume 7, Issue 3) Winter 2022

By In Parentheses in IP Volume 7

32 pages, published 1/15/2022

The Winter 2022 issue of In Parentheses Literary Magazine. Published by In Parentheses (Volume 7, Issue32)

Author: Mr. Phillipe

Phillipe Martin Chatelain / @uptownvoice / Phillipe is the Managing Editor of In Parentheses. He is a poet from New York City with a Masters Degree in Poetry from The New School. He writes as someone in the tradition of the urban troubadour or the flaneur–wandering, taking notes. He believes that poetry of our generation has taken on a much more digital definition. Furthermore, it is important for New Modernist writers like those exhibited in In Parentheses Literary Magazine to assume the forms of media available in order to carry on the history of Sublime Art. His series taking shots alone was self-published in 2012-2015. The self-published collection FACETS (2019) is now available. View all posts by Mr. Phillipe