We were waiting for our journey to Point B
when the conductor, in blunt words,
told us our train had been cancelled.
There has been a fatality on the tracks,
please move to Platform 4.
I thought of greased rails,
unstoppable metal,
eyes widening,
and the impact of a funeral.
But the lady next to me,
with her shopping bags and stormy hair,
was equally destructive when she yelled,
Bloody Hell! Now I’m going to be late!
Molten steel fills my ribcage,
my teeth are barbed-wire,
but the killer bees I want to spit
are stuck on the flypaper of my tongue.
Already, she is picking up steam for the exit.
A cane holding up a man is knocked aside,
and this woman, her bags clattering behind,
explodes down the platform,
the horn of her mouth blaring.
There is an empty moment in the car,
the old man stiffens his suitcoat,
and, in her wake, we are all dragged to Platform 4.
Our bodies are balloons of blood,
so soft, just flesh and eggshell bones.
The hard woman stands alone,
her foot is a tapping piston.
And still the tracks spear the horizon—
there, where a life floated up.
Patrick Hicks is the author of The Commandant of Lubizec, Adoptable, This London, The Collector of Names, and Library of the Mind, among others. His work has appeared on NPR, The PBS NewsHour, American Life in Poetry, and his first novel was selected for National Reading Group Month. He is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University as well as a faculty member in the MFA Program at the University of Nevada at Lake Tahoe. A former Visiting Fellow at Oxford, he was recently a finalist for an Emmy and hosts the popular radio show, Poetry from Studio 47. His latest novel is In the Shadow of Dora.
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