r i g h t  h a n d  p o i n t i n g

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  People Take the Train

Carol Skinner

 


People take the train all the time, she says,
            And I know it, of course.
I’ll be fine, she says,
And, checking a slam, she leaves
me, sitting in the car, watching her go,
the collar of her jacket tinged with blue,
the dusky smell of that suede.

She doesn’t look back, but I sit there. My eyes
            try to hold her;
at my bidding the powers that have never failed me
rise, and from my eyes a glimmering glossy sphere
expands toward her, reaches and envelops her as it always has,
and the rest fades,
            distorts          
                        around
                     us,
 her and me.

But then, unbidden, unwanted:
 “I sit by the window and watch you go,” she tells me
            in her preschool voice.
“That jacket, it’s soft when you carry me.
You just keep going.”

Now, in the thickening crowd, there’s little more to see
than her blue hair banded by earphones
as she steps through shattered glass onto the train.

 

 

 

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Carol Skinner has taught composition and literature at the college level and now works in educational publishing as a writer/editor.   She has contributed articles to Contemporary Poets, Crime and Detective Fiction, and Rolling Stone.  Her story, I Married a Beatle, appeared in Right Hand Pointing Issue 1.

 

 

 

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