______with a line by Larry Levis
We’re sitting on the station platform
in our grandparents’ jackets pretending
to be glamorous Our expressions stolen
from old movie posters Gene Kelly
Lauren Bacall Behind you
The People Mover’s single dumb loop
links one casino to the next Together
we ride the thirteen stops one track to watch
the same arrivals become departures The wreckery
of road work Crack-backed bannisters
The boxcar schizophrenic gumming his knuckles
Touch me I dare you Touch me
And though I know his eyes
refract a ghost-mopped yard
far away his mother maybe
I shrug my collar close afraid
of the nowhere he’s found and laid claim to
This isn’t the whole story Hours ago
in Orlando Florida a man walked inside a night-
club with a semi-automatic rifle in his grip and
I imagine here the dead
as weary passengers out too late past curfew
shuffling on board with each stop and afraid
of returning home to worried parents partners
How they had their own grandparents
with ringed hands palsy-rattled
and wore their own tweed-button jackets and groped
buckles under cover of music and folded
into one another like flags vaguely
ceremonial and danced and
There are certain moments when paired together
that gain a kind of lucidity What does it mean
American There is something in our solitude
that frightens me Isn’t this
how it happens One silhouette in the scenery
suddenly a part of it The doors opening and
the doors opening and the doors
opening and the platform calls
darker now
_____________we’ve arrived