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Submitted
by
John Reid Currie, Student, Queens College |
Path Station
8:09:15 A.M.
our other argument explodes riding the train
whispering like coal, our quiet descent
Manhattan today, I get the F downtown.
I can get out, get seats in another car— refuse to say goodbye
over cellphones, our marriage, this income kills off thousands.
8:46:26 falling dresses
8:49:14 abandoned shoes
9:02:54 paper like snow over the city
9:11:34 surround each other
9:23:04 brushing against drum skin, a sonic boom
9:45:14 no one says hello
9:55:24 walking, a clear Tuesday morning
9:59:04 ten seconds, 425,000 cubic yards of concrete, free fall
10:28:31 a second faster in nine.
*
I still leave my house, early, coughing up, hacking every minute
to pieces, too easy to stay furious, breathing in the foggy air, stenches foul
this place I walk, the pit, a baking hole, no use for trains
After Path Station
Carnivorous icicles invade the salty dark corners of the sandy rocks
in the greater thaw of spring; to remember our sparse blue kitchen
sounds colder as the plunder of warm weather forces the clock
backwards, when I wasn’t so young, but younger, harsher, smitten
by regret, was once the creature from the black lagoon. Comic book
heroes who speak less and act more could not be more stoic than
to know long winters when the freeze is cold enough to crack
your mind in halves selling one as good as the other to the midden
or the Meadows, over the food muck and oyster shells I look
on from the East as a man, the West as a boy to the city beyond in
crisis; what day would be easiest as the train left and the streets shook?
I knew I’d end up in this place, in this time when nothing was done.
—John Reid Currie, Queens College
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