A Review of Our Room at Zagreb’s Esplanade Hotel

Stuffed the spilled contents of my heart from where they had dripped down my chest, my dress, the floor, zipped myself back up, got on a plane, and flew to Split. Met at the airport by another man, by then I’d cleaned myself up. Everything closed tight, to match. We are two zipped-up people in a stately room at the Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb tonight. A chocolate on the pillow, a tub. Decor like the 18th century, Austrian-Hungarian architecture. The Habsburg empire blooms around me, history drags me like a weight, like a piggyback corpse, like when you talk about your ex wife. The way your heart broke when she left. The way you’re sure your adult children shattered in the same way. Each jagged shard of your glass heart slices me. Or used to. I trace circles through our hotel room, between two doors leading from the bathroom to the bedroom and the little settee, circling with the windows open to the end of summer, safe in a room with no past or future, wanting for nothing and going nowhere.

Kristin Sanders is the author of CUNTRY (Trembling Pillow Press), a finalist for the 2015 National Poetry Series, and two chapbooks: Orthorexia and This is a map of their watching me, a finalist in the 2015 BOAAT Chapbook Competition. Her poetry has been included in Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press), and her essays, fiction, and reviews have been published in Hobart, Longreads, Lit Hub, Columbia Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Bitch Magazine, The Guardian, and HTMLGIANT. Originally from Santa Maria, California, she is currently based in Paris, France.