TrainWrite

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 radiated toy soldiers
and her life sped backwards until she was
 nine again, which was when

she sent the train for me.

II

It was nearly midnight. The train stood high as my house. The house is fastened to the track in the back of my yard. Out front, on a street which curves east, then suddenly north, with crazy half blocks shooting off like broken ribs, stand houses so small they look like tokens on a Monopoly board. The train shuddered in the black night. I went to my back door. Overhead, the stars were shining. The engineer turned on the powerful headlight of the locomotive. A bell began to toll. A jackrabbit, startled, ran into a bush. The train began to move. She’d sent it for me, and I had missed it. I waved at the slow train, moving away from me. I wanted it to stop. I would have given anything.

Gary Percesepe is Associate Editor at BLIP Magazine (formerly Mississippi Review), and a Contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. His short stories, poems, essays, reviews, and interviews have been widely published or are forthcoming in several places, including Necessary Fiction, Salon, and Moon Milk Review. He is the author of four books in philosophy and an epistolary novel with Susan Tepper, What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollock and Dori G (Cervana Barva  Press). He recently completed his second novel, Leaving Telluride, set in Telluride, Colorado.

Notes

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