Laurie Sheck, "The Subway Platform"

And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore
    stripped of all premise of softness
or repose. I stood there, beneath the city's sequential grids
    and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappings
like a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light,
    a robe of gold
and then a robe of ash.

All around me were briefcases, cell phones, baseball caps,
    folded umbrellas forlorn and still glistening
with rain. Who owned them? Each face possessed a hiddenness.
    DO NOT STEP ACROSS THE YELLOW LINE; the Transit Authority
had painted this onto the platform's edge
    beyond which the rails

gleamed, treacherous, almost maniacal,
    yet somehow full of promise. Glittery, icy, undead.
Sharp as acid eating through a mask. I counted forward
    in my mind to the third rail, bristling with current,
hissing inside it like a promise or a wish; and the word
    "forward" as if inside it also,

as if there were always a forward, always somewhere else
    to go: station stops, exits, stairways opening out into the dusty
light; turnstiles and signs indicating this street
    or that. Appointments. Addresses. Numbers and letters
of apartments, and their floors. Where was it, that thing I'd felt
    inside me, tensed for flight
or capture, streaked with the notion of distance and desire?
    And the people all around me, how many hadn't

at some time or another curled up in their beds with the shades drawn,
    not knowing how to feel the forwardness, or any trace
of joy? Wing of sorrow, wing of grief,
    I could feel it brushing my cheek, gray bird
I lived with, always it was so quiet on its tether.
    Then the train was finally coming, its earthquaky
rumblings building through the tunnel, its focused light

like a small fury. Soon we would get on, would step into
    that body whose headlights obliterate the tunnel's dark
like chalk scrawling words onto a blackboard.
    I looked down at the hems of the many dresses all around me,
they were so bright! Why hadn't I noticed them before? Reds
    and oranges and blues, geometrical and floral patterns

swirling beneath the browns and grays of raincoats,
    so numerous, so soft: "threshold," I thought, and "lullaby," "disclosure,"
the train growing louder, the feet moving toward the yellow
    line, the hems billowing as the train pulled up,
how they swayed and furrowed and leapt
    as if a seamstress had loosed them like laughter from her hands–


Laurie Sheck

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eavon Boland, "An Elegy for My Mother in which She Scarcely Appears"

I knew we had to grieve for the animals a long time ago: weep for them, pity them. I knew it was our strange human duty to write their elegies after we arranged their demise. I was young then and able for the paradox. I am older now and ready for the question: What happened to them all? I mean to those old dumb implements which have no eyes to plead with us like theirs no claim to make on us like theirs? I mean— there was a singing kettle. I want to know why no one tagged its neck or ringed the tin base of its extinct design or crouched to hear its rising shriek in winter or wrote it down with the birds in their blue sleeves of air torn away with the trees that sheltered them. And there were brass fire dogs which lay out all evening on the grate and in the heat thrown at them by the last of the peat fire but no one noted down their history or put them in the old packs under slate-blue moonlight. There was a wooden clotheshorse, absolutely steady, without sinews, with no mane and no mea
Read more

Sharon Olds, "The Race"

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk, bought a ticket, ten minutes later they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors had said my father would not live through the night and the flight was cancelled. A young man with a dark brown moustache told me another airline had a nonstop leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go down to the first floor, make a right, you'll see a yellow bus, get off at the second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish slipping upstream deftly against the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran, the bags wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material, I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast, I who always go to the end of the line, I said Help me . He looked at my ticket, he said Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then run. I
Read more

Aria Aber, "Oakland in Rain"

Years before ever seeing California, I wrote a story titled “Oakland in Rain.” Rain served as an easy metaphor for the unexpected in a place known for abundance, and it provided a texture of melancholy. The nameless protagonist—an exiled drunk who was, of course, a thinly veiled version of myself— had lost her mind and believed the weather communicated with her: rain meant soberness, that she had been absolved of some sort of punishment. Plagued by her wild inner life, I imagined her wandering the city, intent on getting lost in the Catholic cemeteries, where she took note   of lemons in the wet grass (an offering?), the sky, a hawk on a tree. But no matter where she went, nothing was ever quiet enough. Despite my best efforts, the narrative was bleak; it lacked tension and a convincing resolution. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, one day I woke up and it had been raining in the Oakland of my actual life. Outside my window, the cottonwood trees looked like the day before, but
Read more