An outdated Comfort Inn sign

By Meg Eden Kuyatt

commands us all to be thankful
even though the Comfort Inn itself 
has been plowed into an empty 
snowy parking lot and hardly seems 
one to speak. I have learned 
to be content in all things, Paul says 
in that verse, an art the sign has seemed 
to grasp but I am still failing in. Will I be 
alive tomorrow? Will I write more words? 
It is almost Thanksgiving
in upstate New York and it’s started 
to snow again—like it does in the movies—
and this is the part where I’m supposed to see
the magic in each flake but all I can focus on
are the grey awful mounds 
shoveled by the side of the road. I want
to think my words will let me live forever. 
I have been given everything yet still I long 
for everything; even blessed 
I long for blessings.

Meg Eden Kuyatt is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection Drowning in the Floating World and the forthcoming obsolete hill (Fernwood Press, 2026) and children’s novels including the Schneider Family Book Award Honor-winning Good Different, The Girl in the Walls, and Perfect Enough, all with Scholastic. When she isn’t writing, she teaches creative writing students. Find her online at megedenbooks.com.