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Trains, an American's StoryBy M. Alouette QuailBellMagazine.com In the first house where I lived, we could hear the highway and the above-ground subway So many bees in so many jars Jump cut fifteen years Clak clak screeeeech clak clak I'm at the window like a cat watching birds And when the Metro lady sings I step off and dart up the stairs And then I graduate and move away Every night, a freight train lulls me to sleep in the prairie Ice traps each branch, each cornstalk A railroad bisects my campus The year ends We drive halfway across the contiguous U.S. listening to cowboy sagas on tape, sometimes halted by a locomotive My next home is a dorm in an old city A forlorn chooo chooo keeps me up at first but it soon becomes another texture in the soundscape I adore And when I travel, I seek trains Paris—a quick ride to the Eiffel Tower Dark, still steamy, Nutella in the air Exhausted from the airport fiascos Pissed that the Louvre closed, but, look, we're in the City of Love and all those films In Scotland British accent: “Ticket, please,” just like in the movies That time I almost took The Clockwork Orange and then decided to walk across town instead Hours on board in New York To Far Rockaway To Floral Park And everywhere else And all those heavy-lidded walks through Union Station My first train station, the place we'd always pick up my grandparents when they came down from Manhattan Our train set had wooden tracks and little cars with magnets CommentsComments are closed.
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