Poem: Trains, an American's Story

Trains, an American's Story

By 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