February 2012
8 posts
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February 7, 2012
by Jakob Maier
i need to tell you about the train
i have seen a crying old man on it before
i have not seen you on it before
i want you in every seat and every station and anywhere everywhere i can want you
Jakob Maier is a writer, musician, voracious eater of tacos, and college student.
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The United States of America
by Jason Lee Norman Author’s Note: I couldn’t have written this story without listening to the song “Rows of Houses,” by Dan Mangan, and watching the movie Stand by Me, directed by Rob Reiner. In the United States of America, children everywhere are waiting for summer vacation. To a child in the United States, there is summer vacation and then there is everything else. Summer...
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Jailbait at the Train Stop
by Zach Fishel
Conductor’s Note: The following is the third in a series of three poems from the same trip, at the same station, in different parts. Return to Monday’s issue to start from the beginning.
She is tiny, with legs stiff as
rain gutters,
holding everything in despite the downpour.
Heather grey tights
and a mini-skirt.
Her hair is bleached light and
glasses dark around
...
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Out of Town
by Zach Fishel
Conductor’s note: The following is the second in a series of poems from the same trip, at the same station, in different parts. Return to TrainWrite on Friday for the final leg of the journey.
I’m at the train stop. I forgot my headphones so
I am dreading the sounds
I am about to hear. The woman wheezing receiving
judgment from the other overnight bus riders who can’t...
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The Biker Waiting to Get Home
by Zach Fishel
Conductor’s Note: The following is the first in a series of three poems from the same trip, at the same station, in different parts. Return to TrainWrite on Wednesday, February 15 and Friday, February 17 to continue the journey.
Her hair was the color of a used leather belt
and she stood
with a bottle of cheap Merlot
alongside the train tracks
waiting at the same...
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A Moon Over the Rails
by J.R. Rogers
Peter and his wife Mimi had been riding for the last two days. They were on a train from Los Angeles to New York.
They slipped away from the coast just as the afternoon rush was building. Mimi, who worked downtown, met Peter in the cavernous station still in her work clothes. She looked distraught, dragging her heavy suitcase across the concourse toward him.
Now, it was nine...
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The Night Train
by Gary Percesepe
for J I The night train stopped at my house. It sat on the tracks in the black winter night, waiting. I was lying in bed looking at a picture of a woman whose cancerous breasts had sent her lover packing but not before penning a short note which he thoughtfully pinned to her bed cover. Her hair came out in clots that felt like straw fed to galloping ghost horses ridden by...
January 2012
10 posts
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A Train to Somewhere
by Nathaniel Tower
Poppa took me on my first train ride when he thought I was going soft. I was fourteen years old and hadn’t scored with a girl yet, and he had this inkling I didn’t want to.
“Every real man has taken a train ride,” he told me when we pulled in to the train station’s parking lot.
“Can’t we just drive there?” I asked even though I...
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The B-sides
by Gabby
1. I often tell people that I don’t know what I want but I’m lying. I know what I want but I’m scared that you’ll look at me like I am hot cider in the summertime. 2. I want to stop talking about the weather and speaking in the language of winds that lap the sides of our faces like a wet dog. I want to take the stars down from their shelves in the sky so you can look at...
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Tolstoy's Muse
by Alessandra Bava
You head to the train station holding your purse but no suitcase. Lips tightened,
you run along the tracks to kiss your last Muscovite Lover, Death. The horse’s
nostrils blow steam as you hold the reins of the suicidal drive, Karenina. Your
unmade Beauty lies now amid iron bars holding a carmine ermine muff hiding
the whitest hands. Прощание*…
*Farewell
Alessandra Bava...
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“When I was about eleven, I would ride from my family’s house on a dusty...”
– Evan P. Schneider, A Simple Machine, Like the Lever
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Sleepers
by Alex M. Pruteanu
We took a sleeper to Amsterdam from I-don’t-know-where because France derailed us with its wines and cognacs and armagnacs. And girls with Gauloises. I know we paid in Guilders (there was no Euro then) through a small opening at a small window to a shrunken woman with spectacles who then said, “Welcome,” but more in the “welcome to Europe” way than the polite response one...
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NIGHT OF FIRE & MYSTERY
by Craig Scott
Based upon the supposed last words of J.M. Barrie, Henry Ward Beecher, Pablo Picasso, and Daniel Webster, respectively.
1. I can’t sleep. A house burns down a neighborhood away. If I could sing I would sing a song for its ashes. 2. I wander into the fog. A dog whimpers. Now comes the mystery. 3. Drink to me, my shadow on the wall, what I said in the dark. 4. I...
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“The doors of the T clamped my briefcase, and you helped me tug at it to no...”
– J.E. Reich, “The Story of Us”
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Delusion Angel: Reprise
by Laura Musselman I watched as you poured two more glasses of wine, asked you about the craziest thing you’d ever done for a girl. I’d just finished telling you about the one and only threesome I ever had, searched your face for judgment, and maybe somehow disappointingly, found none. You hesitated, said, “Nothing.” I pressed. You said, “Well, I flew to Europe. I guess you could say she was...
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“Three steps down from our deck, the desert surrounds us: Mountains like cutout...”
– Alison Blake, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” from Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad
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Lefthand View
by Marcus Speh
The city grew around the small brick house like an oyster around a dark pearl of uncertain nature. Inside the house, the two old people moved little as if saving themselves for a long journey. Outside, the brown village road turned high and black as the city swallowed the suburbs and spread its tentacles, touching more and more lives, eating more and more bodies, tying people...
December 2011
8 posts
3 tags
“On one night in particular I woke up after the subway went above ground and...”
– Sarah Flynn, “Goodbye To All That”
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Situations for Young Ladies
by Sarah Malone
On the twenty-eighth floor of a building now long demolished, Dorothy Zimmer returned to her desk and found a girl with the new puffed sleeves and white lace all around the base of her high collar. She was fixing her hair at Dorothy’s hand-mirror. She had the scent of the El on a summer afternoon.
“What are you doing here?” Dorothy said.
“I type,” the girl said. “On twenty-nine....
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“Kim died on Saturday of a heart attack while on a train.”
– Evan Ramstad, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il Is Dead,” Wall Street Journal
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Push Tape to Signal for Stop, by Emely Paulino →
fwrictionreview:
“Would you like a seat, mister?” offers a girl who looks about sixteen. John looks at her hands, covered in crumbs from the chips she was just eating, and clenches his fists. Would you like a napkin, Kelsey?
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angels with rusty steel wings
by Jessie Lynn
A ghost hiss of train smoke – angel breath; the rustle of a rucksack – invisible, vestigial wings; the clank and thunder of steel on steel, freight on track – calloused fingers scraping against guitar strings. And all the lonely lonely in this land, searching with their big empty hearts, hearts big and empty as the Grand Canyon, searching searching for that fairytale place...
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from A Simple Machine, Like the Lever →
by Evan P. Schneider
Conductor’s Note: The following is a submitted excerpt from Evan P. Schneider’s debut novel A Simple Machine, Like the Lever (Propeller Books), now available for purchase at Powell’s.
Sometimes time just evaporates. Especially when the weather changes and I want to remain fully cognizant of what’s occurring in the trees. At this time of year hillsides start...
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Calling all train writers!
TrainWrite is currently seeking some killer fiction and nonfiction prose to close out 2011. Submit your best work to trainwritesubmissions@gmail.com and spread the word! The author of my favorite piece will receive a special holiday gift from the conductor.
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Subway Senryu
by Virginie Colline
feeling a bit nervous
between the sudoku women
go figure
Virginie Colline is a French translator living in Paris. Her poems have been published in Kitchen, Pipe Dream and EgoPHobia, among others. Her poem, haiku de nuit, appeared in the September 13, 2011 issue of TrainWrite.
November 2011
5 posts
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“I’m 27, and female, and Catholic (full disclosure here), but I still see myself...”
– Karen Eileen Sikola, review of Scott Nadelson’s Aftermath in Ploughshares
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Conductor
by Karen Greenbaum-Maya
Suicide by train is also popular in many developed countries. Without ready access to firearms, suicidal people often turn to trains. —Der Spiegel, July 27, 2011
Once it happens you can’t remember how you started out: innocent, barreling into the tunnel, shooting out at each station like a dolphin out of a dim green pool. Pneumatic doors inhale open, puff...
chris:
The announcer on the train just said “good evening, ladies and gentlemen”
It’s 4:15
I hate winter
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“Those years you could buy a two-week train pass on Amtrak and go wherever the...”
– Andre Dubus III, Townie
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Need a break from train stories? Then check out my essay, “In the Key of F Major,” at Used Furniture Review. Even my mom likes it.
love, KES
October 2011
6 posts
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“I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight, or rather...”
– Bram Stoker, Dracula, Chapter 1
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In Absentia
by Howie Good
1 I asked the pale child on the playground where you were. No answer. I went upstairs, but the bed was empty. If I closed my eyes for even one moment, I was pestered by flies and terrible dreams. I came back down. The new world suffered from the same impudent weather as the old. I stopped every few feet to look around. Whole weeks rushed past me. A stranger’s face quivered with...
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“At sixteen he’d been a foreman for a gang of gandy dancers, grown men...”
– Andre Dubus III, Townie
As Heard on the T
“I need to get a 4.0 so I can go to BC, or Harvard.”
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Coal Train
by Helen Vitoria
Conductor’s note: Helen’s poem “Paris Metro, 2000” was published in the April 6, 2011 issue of TrainWrite.
You will call me and tell me about how the coal train has not gone through Nesquehoning in almost sixty years, you will remind me how you are only forty but know that about the architecture of small Pennsylvania coal towns, you will share your fears...
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Track
by Tomas Transtromer (translation by Robert Bly)
2 A.M.: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town, flickering coldly on the horizon. As when a man goes so deep into his dream he will never remember that he was there when he returns again to his room. Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness that his days all become some flickering sparks, a...
September 2011
8 posts
3 tags
Morrison County Local News
by Dinah Serritelli A Caucasian male has been found by The Old Mill railway line, a line not used in over thirty years. No identification was found other than a well-worn Bible, on the fly leaf an inscription reading “To my precious son, remember God loves you and so do I. ~Momma.” It was dated 1952. Death was natural causes, age and hard-living appearing to be a big factor. Anyone...
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Rally Cap
by Karen E. Sikola
The details, as told to me by someone who matters: 10 p.m. The Sox are up 3-2 with their two best pitchers on the way. The Rays are losing 7-0 in the 7th. Over the course of the next hour, the Rays come back. As the Rays tie up their game 7-7, the Sox’ closing pitcher slowly blows the game in the 9th. The Sox lose the game. On a walk off single.
Three minutes later, the...
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Untitled
by Katie
Sunlight burns through carriage windows while the clouds threaten rain, a glimpse of graffiti on a stone grey wall then it’s gone. On to the next one. A child cries while a business man arranges a meeting and I try to piece together the night before. I’ll stay for one more had turned into I’ll come for a little bit and before we knew it it was three. I’ll call a cab became let me get...
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haiku de nuit
by Virginie Colline
a street lamp named desire any black you like as long as it’s bright
Virginie Colline is a French translator living in Paris. Her poems have been published in The Scrambler, Everyday Other Things, and The Scarlet Sound, among others.
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MAX, part 1
by Christopher Oie Keller The earliest memory is my mother’s friend Cathleen (the name always sounding odd) and her daughter – a cute thing faded with time. The next,
my aunt, but now that I write it, it feels like a false memory, so my third
is my parents, mom laughing at dad pushing her feet back with his, asking, as if a great transgression had been made, “Will you please keep your shoes behind...
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“23. I love the Pats because it makes me feel like I have something in common...”
– Jenna Mantis, “24 Reasons I Love Football and The Pats”
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The Train Writer
by Karen Eileen Sikola
She wrote about a boy named Federico, or Giovanni, and how she noticed him and his brown hair just as closing time came around.
She held her phone with banana slug fingers, her thumbs flying feverishly across the face of a virtual keyboard. She sat forward in the seat next to mine, just far enough for me to read each new sentence without notice. Occasionally she would stop...
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“With its many arches leading to other parts of the station and its central,...”
– Alastair Macaulay, “The Fluid Human Dance That Is Grand Central”
August 2011
15 posts
2 tags
A Known Stranger
by Jenna Mantis
The morning commuters of the 8:20 AM- 8:30 AM inbound trains from Coolidge Corner to Boston have become my acquaintances. We don’t speak to one another, we don’t know each other’s names, but I’ve come to know more about these strangers’ lives than I should admit. There’s the six-foot-something, taller-than-everyone-else-on-the-train man who works in the Copley area....
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On The Platform, Staring
Submitted by personalitytheory
That you held me close and stroked my hair
Kissed my lips
Poured some kind of love into my eyes
Ruined me.
You,
Knew it was the last time.
The life I could not follow was idling on the rails
Calling to you
Hurry, hurry.
I’m amazed you took the time
To not even say goodbye
When you had known the date and time all along.
Your hundred veiled clues.
You...
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“During the week, they never hung out, but they had those Saturdays, and there...”
– Dennis Lehane, Mystic River
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“Did you hear about them taking a private train from London to Glasgow? Not just...”
– Suri Cruise, on the Jolie-Pitt clan
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U/S Bahn
Submitted by toomuchpractice
Kicking at the floor with the thickened rubber at your toes. You would pace if you thought you could get away with it. I look at my feet too, between my knees, the metal grille chair pushing puckers into the backs of my thighs. Your train will come first, the signs say, in 6min, a plastic yellow glow against the black background. 9min for me. Dazed. I would have...