The next day, I bought the cheapest plane ticket I could find and booked a night in the Super 8 outside of Coeur d’Alene. The room had red checkered half-curtains and free toothpaste.
Gutters reads America’s remaining local print newspapers to create a found poetry of lost housing. All text is found spanning the gap (‘gutter’) between two or more adjacent columns of newsprint in articles pertaining to the housing crisis, land conservation, and climate catastrophe.
When I think of setting, I like using the word figment, because it’s defined as something that a person believes to be real, but only exists in their imagination.
At night, when the palm trees begin to cast shadows and the city begins to reflect the vast disparities between affluence and adversity, Stevie’s sleepless mind can no longer dream, literally and figuratively.