Mid-Town Brown Line, Rush Hour

This is the second exercise in the W.S. Graham challenge at PFFA. The first line of the poem is from one of Graham's poems. I only had an hour to write it.

Meanwhile surely there must be something to say,
but nothing forms or travels out of our bodies.
He stands so close his flannel shirt
rubs its cheek against me.

The train must be
coming
from somewhere, the north maybe.
He’s reading the New Yorker. The floor,
covered in dark homogenous city,
scuffles its feet.

I find myself
waiting
for the distant rumble:
steel and bones shifting
side to side.
Another minute
and we’ll hear it, all of us, evaporating
into our music and magazines.
Pressed hard,
almost knocked off balance
by the air splitting outward from the train.

First Post

I chose to put a poem here that I've worked on for a while. It is by no means perfect, but I hope someone enjoys it.

Stage I

When her husband, thin as sheetrock,
speaks his news, like prodding livestock,

her nerves sear. She slaps the house plant,
burns a cigarette. How her life slants

inside his words. You can beat this. Ashes
flake on the Berber carpet. Her face flashes

in the window pane. Let’s not do
Polyanna, he says. This is measured

in years. And stages. Strange, how his voice
stabilizes. As if his spine were a force

against his torso. Tomorrow,
she could cleave her thigh bone; scrape the marrow

to a paper sack. Instead, she’ll wake to fluorescent lights,
Pepsi, Jell-o, the patient scent of formaldehyde.