DEDICATED TO
THE ONE I LOVE
by Lauren Clark
The train reaches my station.
It stops, then moves forward.
No one stops me not moving.
Then familiar five-and-dime
blurs into water tower blurs
into dark fields beyond glass.
They cannot kick me off until
Toledo at least, where every
one will rise from sleep and
go to smoke on the platform
except me, except the other
steadily unconscious bodies
of passengers. My stop has
gone. It cannot come back.
Even if they catch me I will
not disembark, not without
a fistfight. I haven’t changed
my underwear in three days.
If you could love me still
I would know by now.
Lauren Clark holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan and works as Program & Development Coordinator at Poets House in New York City. Their first collection of poems, Music for a Wedding, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2016 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017. See more at www.laurclar.com.